Comparing the appropriateness of psychometric scales for evaluating multimodal messages

The project aimed to investigate whether the psychometric scales that are available in the literature are suitable for evaluating digital multimodal texts. In the context of formal education, students routinely create multimodal messages of all kinds (such as digital videos) as part of the core requirements for course work. Even though many psychometrically valid scales have been published in various fields such as entertainment, communication, and advertising, there is no psychometric scale available in the field of education for evaluating multimodal messages. This research project comparatively examined the appropriateness of 11 psychometric scales with an extensive sample of 380 multimodal messages that had been created by student teachers. The results indicate that (a) each scale has its own unique properties, (b) there is a considerable scale overlap, and (c) none of the scales can be directly applied to multimodal messages for assessing their quality.