The re-conceptualisation of texts over the last 20 years, as well as the development of a multimodal understanding of communication and representation of knowledge, has profound consequences for the reading and understanding of multimodal texts, not least in educational contexts. However, if teachers and students are given tools to "unwrap" multimodal texts, they can develop a deeper understanding of texts, information structures, and the textual organisation of knowledge. This article presents a model for working with multimodal texts in education with the intention to highlight mutual multimodal text analysis in relation to the subject content. Examples are taken from a Singaporean science textbook as well as a Chilean science textbook, in order to demonstrate that the framework is versatile and applicable across different cultural contexts. The model takes into account the following aspects of texts: the general structure, how different semiotic resources operate, the ways in which different resources are combined (including coherence), the use of figurative language, and explicit/implicit values. Since learning operates on different dimensions-such as social and affective dimensions besides the cognitive onesour inclusion of figurative language and values as components for textual analysis is a contribution to multimodal text analysis for learning.

As been highlighted by many, for instance by PISA, Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) is a critical and necessary 21st century skill across educational settings. While many initiatives have been launched to investigate the nature of these skills, fewer are the attempts to understand how they should be assessed. However, in 2015, the PISA organization presented a framework for assessing CPS skills. This paper reports on a study investigating the predictive validity of the PISA assessment framework and if and how modes of communication influence the assessment of 24 students’ collaborative problem solving activities when using a computer-based assessment task system. The findings presented demonstrate that the PISA CPS assessment framework have a weak predictive validity, does not count for quality or productivity in communication, and that the mode of communication indeed influence CPS processes and in turn what is possible to assess.

Against the background of a longstanding collaboration between Gunther Kress’s research group in London and my own research group in Stockholm, I reflect, in this paper, on the role of Kress’s ideas in our joint development of a social semiotic, multimodal, and design-oriented approach to learning, an approach which sees learning as performative, and as an activity in which learners create their own learning paths. I first discuss how, for Kress, this path has three elements, the affordances of the learning resources available to the learner, the learner’s ‘interest’ which turns aspects of these resources into ‘prompts’ for learning, and the learner’s active interpretation and transformation of these aspects, the results of which can then be recognized and valued as ‘signs of learning’. However, recognizing learning also needs to take account of the dimension of time, so as to make it possible to assess whether learners have gained knowledges and skills they did not have at an earlier stage. I then discuss the role of context in Kress’s thinking about learning. For Kress, context is another vital aspect of a social semiotic theory of learning. On the one hand, Kress focuses here on the specific, unique contexts in which individual learners create their own learning paths. On the other hand, he recognizes that signs will always carry social and political relations. Reflecting on the dynamic relation between individual learners and the way institutions regulate ways of learning, I discuss both the continued role of institutional learning contexts and their hidden curricula, and the way emerging technologies facilitate individual learning paths and interactive, participatory forms of learning.