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Classroom environments have been hot spots for studies of conversational “floor maintenance,” or the ways in which people establish interactional rights and obligations through turn-taking or topical cohesion. We know less about how the physical floor of interaction is negotiated when activities literally take place on the floor, as in Kindergarten classrooms. In floor-based learning activities, body movements, body positions, and proximity are key modalities for establishing rights and obligations for participating in tasks. This paper analyzes video of Kindergarteners engaged in a floor-based learning activity, where children moved around and positioned themselves (and others) to participate. We found that while children often leaned in to the task-space, there were occasions where they sat back, but were nonetheless productive. Referring to these latter forms of participation as “zones of productive exclusion,” we analyze how body positioning indexed children’s rights and obligations in-task. We discuss implications for analyses of the powered relations between differently-positioned bodies. 

Performance assessments can provide meaningful insights into young children's knowledge; however, documenting assessment responses as incorrect or correct limits our understanding of students’ abilities. One method of improving our ability to measure student understanding is by documenting the strategies students use to engage with assessment tasks. In this study, we describe how purposeful assessment design can provide insight into students’ thinking by qualitatively examining how students solve performance assessment items using multimodal strategies.