Volume 2: Using Portfolios in Assessment
As one piece of an overall assessment plan, portfolios offer several unique attributes that may impact both course planning and student learning. Because portfolios are multi-sourced, they offer the instructor a variety of evidence about student competency. Because portfolios capture growth and change in student thinking and learning over time, they have the potential to provide a continuous and dynamic look at student development. Because each portfolio is unique, students typically feel a greater sense of ownership of their work, which often leads to the opportunity to integrate academic course work with other life experiences.
Barton and Collins (1997) propose three aspects of portfolio design as being critical:
PURPOSES: Clearly communicating explicit purposes prevents portfolios from becoming busywork. In order to qualify for inclusion in the portfolio, each piece of evidence must be created and organized so as to fulfill a specific purpose or goal within the course design. Making these goals clear to students at the outset, and then consciously and continually linking these goals with instruction, help both instructors and students see the connections between course planning, daily instruction, learning outcomes, and assessment. One place to start is by asking ourselves, "What is it I really want my students to learn in this course?"
EVIDENCE: What kinds of evidence are available to you and to your students that will demonstrate how the purposes of the portfolios have been met? Evidence might include homework, student papers, special projects, interviews, instructor’s observational notes made during an oral presentation, student goal statements, and reflective statements made by students as they review and organize the evidence in their portfolios. Barton and Collins (1997) suggest having a caption attached to each piece of portfolio evidence that describes what it is, why it is evidence, and of what it is evidence. Captions not only help students "prove" what they know, but they help instructors evaluate our instructional effectiveness as we reconstruct the instructional context for each piece of portfolio evidence summarized in the caption. How much evidence should be included? Elbow (1991) suggests stopping when the next piece adds nothing new. How evidence should be presented will require guidance from you as to alternative formats such as chronological or thematic.
ASSESSMENT CRITERIA: Grading portfolio entries is no more difficult than grading papers or projects. Generally, the quality of student effort and accuracy of our assessments of those efforts depend on how clearly we communicate to students the goals of the course in terms of what we want them to learn. Each piece of evidence in the portfolio can be evaluated against whether or not it meets its intended purpose in a compelling way. Those pieces considered less than compelling usually include either too little information or fail to demonstrate an explicit link between the evidence and the purpose. Returning less than compelling pieces to students with suggestions for what needs to be added to this piece in order to show that the purposes have been met, provides specific guidance for improvement.
Barton and Collins (1997) suggest that among the benefits of using portfolios are viewing student work in context, encouraging a shift in ownership of learning to students, and making more explicit the goals of instruction along with continuous links between teaching, learning, reflection, and evaluation.
References
Barton, J., and Collins, A., Eds. (1997). Portfolio Assessment: A Handbook for Educators. Menlo Park: Addison-Wesley.
Elbow, P. (1991). Forward to, Portfolios: Process and Products (P. Belanoff and M. Dickson, Eds.). Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook.
Knight, M., and Gallaro, D. (1994). Portfolio Assessment: Applications of Portfolio Analysis. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc.
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