Receptive and Productive Modalities
Receptive modalities: Ways that students receive communications from others, e.g., listening, reading, viewing. Assessment of receptive modalities focuses on student communication of their understanding of the meaning of communications from others. Because this is done through a productive modality, assessment of students’ skills and abilities with respect to receptive modalities is not as straightforward as that of productive modalities. Examples of students’ demonstration of receptive abilities with respect to curriculum content are using tonal qualities of voice to help convey meaning from a passage read aloud, restating a classmate’s comment, describing how the key and tempo of a piece of music set a mood.
Productive modalities: Ways that students communicate to others, e.g., speaking, writing, drawing. Assessment of productive modalities focuses on student communication of their own understanding or interpretation. Examples of students’ demonstration of productive abilities with respect to understanding curriculum content are writing an analysis, drawing and labeling a scale model, sculpting a figure from clay.