Portfolios
The portfolio can be thought of as a scrapbook for holding all significant pieces of a student’s work throughout the semester. The collection serves not only as a kind of learning journal and repository for what a student has created, but also as a means of tracking what progress has been made. The ever-growing portfolio can foster a sense of pride in what has been accomplished and also document the student’s growth and development.
Digital portfolios are more versatile than paper-and-ink versions because they easier to manipulate and a can accommodate a wider variety of media such as audio and video files. An Internet-based version is even more useful because it can be shared easily and used for a variety of pedagogical purposes, including as a source for student-generated readings for other classes. But even a paper version can be an extremely important tool for sensitizing students to the process of learning.
If each assignment or piece of work a student produces is seen as a discrete, isolated effort, unconnected to what has come before or what goes after, a great deal of learning potential is lost. The simple process of preserving a piece of work and treating it as something of value rather than discarding it once it is finished can help change a student’s perspective about learning. If a student works on a report or presentation and the focus is only on the final product rather than on the creation process, which involves research, planning, writing and revision, then the message given is that work and effort have little value and that it is only the product that counts. Such an attitude debases the process of learning and promotes such behaviors as cheating and plagiarizing. And if the product is tossed out after it is graded, the student is deprived of a sense of pride and accomplishment and is primed to think that the grade, not learning, is what matters.
The portfolio helps place the focus on process rather than product. What the student learns along the way while working on a report or presentation is much more significant than the actual product because what has been learned becomes part of the student’s repertory of skills that can be applied in future undertakings, while the product is just a dead artifact.
So the portfolio is not just a place to display finished pieces but is intended to document how those pieces were developed and improved along the way. Let’s say that a student writes a letter to a university official to set up an appointment for an interview as part of a larger project. While the letter has a specific goal and purpose – to persuade the official to schedule an interview – the goal of the letter-writing activity is much larger and entails learning how to do things that couldn't be done before. Writing a letter requires putting together grammatically accurate sentences, organizing those sentences into coherent paragraphs, having an awareness of audience, spelling correctly, indenting and punctuating according to conventions, and most important of all, having a message or an idea to express. The letter itself, if successful, serves as a key to the next phase of the project, namely, conducting an interview. However, the real point of the activity is to make the student a more capable writer who will be able to compose other texts for other purposes later on in college classes or as an employee.
Undoubtedly, several revisions of the letter will be needed before a final draft is ready and corrections and suggestions from the teacher, peers and perhaps other individuals will precede each revision. Each version of the letter should go into the portfolio, preferably, along with notes by the student indicating not only what changes were made but why they were made. The letter activity, in turn, takes its place in the portfolio along with documents and perhaps audio and video clips related to other activities from this and other projects. The portfolio becomes an important compendium of what the student has accomplished in the course of the term. The value of the portfolio for holistic assessment of each student’s proficiency, progress and industriousness is obvious, but no less important is the attitude about the learning process that the act of compiling it fosters in the student.
Because portfolios present a diachronic view of student proficiency, they offer credible evidence of the degree of progress achieved in the course of study and so allow a more holistic form of assessment than is generally possible. Holistic assessment, based on what many consider subjective analysis, is often eschewed in favor of quantitative assessment, which is seen as more rigorous, objective and reliable. Even though the numbers produced by the latter may not have any real meaning, they facilitate teacher accountability in the assignment of grades (i.e. provide cover) by supplying tangible evidence to support the grades given. Portfolios provide even better documentation to support grading decisions in that the students' actual work stands as evidence and not a just a set of numbers that could have been generated by faulty tests, rubrics or other assessment instruments.
The portfolio reinforces the idea that the objective of activities is not to produce perfect products but opportunities for learning. It is not particularly helpful for a student to produce an error-less essay or exceptional presentation if, while working on those products, skills have not been acquired to allow replication of the feat in subsequent activities. In the portfolio, the first draft of essay #2 should be more similar to the final draft of essay #1 in terms of writing quality than the first draft of essay #1. If that is not the case, whether the student has actually learned anything of value can be questioned.
The portfolio integrates all activities and projects and serves as a repository of work done, a learning journal documenting what has been accomplished, a sourcebook for materials and language use, and a corpus of student output that can be holistically assessed and perhaps used for future pedagogical, research purposes.
Mark Feder
Denver, October, 2012
