Engaging learners in constructing multimedia artifacts provides rich opportunities for them to make their thinking visible. In this research, we demonstrate the use of the VMCAnalytic, a multimedia artifact that builds on an extensive video collection of children’s mathematical reasoning. Using reliable rubrics, we coded all VMCAnalytics created in a range of classes. These rubrics focused on the quality of the students’ arguments and depth of their reasoning. Analysis showed that the rubric was useful in differentiating among the different groups of students. Moreover, different metrics had different degrees of correlation, suggesting that we were identifying several different dimensions of quality.

Engaging students in technology-rich projects provides opportunities for both learning and making their thinking visible (Collins & Halverson, 2009). Creating multimedia artifacts offers opportunities for learners to engage with substantive content through their designs (Kafa & Ching, 2001). Building on earlier research with a video repository, we provide opportunities for students to engage in generative activity through construction of multimedia artifacts by making use of a new tool, the VMCAnalytic (Agnew, Mills, & Maher, 2010). In prior work, we examined a range of course contexts and tasks in which learners used the VMCAnalytic (Hmelo-Silver et al., 2013). In current research, we extend the range of contexts in which learners’ use of the tool to construct multimedia artifacts enables assessment of the complex knowledge required for understanding, teaching, and researching the development of mathematical reasoning in students across several content domains. In particular, we examine how graduate students create arguments using videos of student reasoning by bringing together ideas from mathematics education and the learning sciences with the perceptual grounding of classroom practice to warrant claims about learning. Our research questions for this paper are as follows:(1) To what extent can we use a cyber-enabled multimedia construction tool to assess how well learners justify their arguments about children’s reasoning?(2) To what extent do students identify relevant concepts in making their claims?(3) How, if at all, does variation in course context, with differing instructional guidelines for completing a task, relate to qualitative differences in the multimedia artifacts that students produce?