Abstract | Overview | Background | Portfolio Structure | Portfolio Assessment | Models | Infrastructure Considerations | Challenges | ReferencesThe Autobiography Model For Developmental Reflection
Reflection and Learning | Format | Assessment | Example Portfolio
W. Webster Newbold
Background
My work with portfolios began in departmental assessment of
English major students during their capstone
seminar taken near the end of their undergraduate
careers. Our senior capstone seminars normally include
two main emphases: a special topic for detailed study, organized and
presented according to the expertise of the teacher involved, and the
presentation of a senior portfolio as the
only program-wide instrument for assessing students' progress. My
special topic was a study of textuality
and new media an historical look at literacy development itself
followed by a critical comparison of how digital media are affecting
communication and thinking. From this perspective, it was
natural to include the actual use of new media tools to assemble and
present students' work; I chose electronic portfolios as one
promising way of managing the assessment of students' progress as
literacy practitioners and scholars, and I worked the production of
the document into the activities
of the course. Students would study about how language expression
changed over time, and would explore and learn for themselves how the
emerging tools of their age impacted their own literacy.
My portfolio program is not
primarily designed for teacher education; however, about fifty-five
percent of our majors are education
students, and I asked them to include within their larger English
portfolio their experiences and artifacts as emerging
educators. This is in addition to the general
requirements of all students that they reflect in detail on
their learning, that they present a minimal number and type of
examples of their work as evidence, and that they offer some
"showpiece" artifacts that demonstrate their best achievements. After
three separate offerings of this seminar, my sense is that students
are pleased with their learning generally, and most pleased that they
have a chance to express themselves in a creative way and emerge with
a product that both helps them look back to where they've been but
also points them forward to the future.
Reflection and Learning
The focal point of this large project is the literacy
autobiography, a critical retrospective which engages students in
reflection about their mental development along with creatively
communicating and defending that reflection. To initiate and
sustain this process, I insist that students produce enough
reflective text to stimulate their own thinking heuristically, and to
engage readers with concrete evidence of their process and growth.
Such intense reflection has been the driving force or obstacle to
overcome for almost all students in the seminars I have
offered. As they look back over as much of their work as they
can gather, they talk about gaining a new perspective on their
education, often with areas for improvement starkly evident. But they
for the most part enjoy and value the chance to present themselves in
a new media format using challenging (often exasperating) new
electronic literacy tools. In the multi-media environment they
recognize something new, the beginning of a new form of expression
and communication in which they have a huge stake. Even students who
are not computer competent, and who feel pressed to keep up with the
development process, almost always end up with a sense of having
added value to their education and to
themselves.
Much of the reflective learning is encouraged by the hypertextual
nature of the environment. Collecting old essays and school papers
into a manila folder or three-ring binder is one thing; dynamically
linking one document with another in a "seamless" web of text and
graphics is quite another. I require a minimal number of
links because I want students to
explore how they can connect their learning on different levels,
especially the metacognitive with the more concrete, the concept or
generalization with the example. This process reinforces traditional
academic literacies of argument-and-support, but also allows a new
flexibility in organizing textual and graphic elements. Undoubtedly
the environment encourages new thinking modes acknowledging more,
perhaps, the associational way out mental faculties work and
suggesting new means and paths of symbolic communication. Such
phenomena cry out for more research to help us understand how
thinking adapts to ways of experiencing and manipulating symbolic
elements.
Jason's portfolio is particularly
good at making links between prior work and current reflection.
It is, however, a PowerPoint project translated into a Web site. The
reader should bear this in mind when considering aspects of screen
display and navigation. [Note: You must use MS Internet Explorer to view Jason's portfolio.]
Format
Unlike my portfolio task-force colleagues and many others at Ball
State and elsewhere, I did not select Webpages as the preferred
vehicle for the English majors portfolio. There were several
major reasons for this:
Assessment
As with the teacher education portfolio, fair and efficient
assessment of majors portfolios is a crucial consideration.
Initially, as I was the only teacher in our majors program using
electronic portfolios with everyone in the senior seminar, I have
assessed each portfolio myself as a course project; using the
guidelines I furnished early on, I mainly checked for evidence of
significant effort at gathering prior work and reflecting on it as an
indicator of growth and change. Students needed to have a minimal
number of example texts, and needed to make use of them clearly and
reasonably. There had to be so many links between the autobiography
and example texts, and there had to be enough showpiece selections of
different assignment types essays and research projects. Education
students had to include several lesson plans and furnish a philosophy
of teaching as well. As in many major assignments, "learning
process" indicators were significant I evaluated to what extent
students carefully read and enacted my process comments on their
draft versions, which they received at two points before final
submission of the portfolio. Technical aspects such as links
also had to be functioning successfully, and language accuracy and
usage correctness also figured in.
Clearly, I have thus far been engaging in a type of assessment
that looks at individual students and constrains ranking or grading
to a limited number of rubrics laid down in the course.
While I think that this has been valuable for them and me, it stops
short of where portfolio assessment claims to offer major
advantages in the authentic assessment of an individual's work over
time, and in the assessment of programmatic success. I did not
revisit the evaluations students received on assignments from prior
courses, and I did not apply any means to judge how well those
students had been taught by other English faculty. To bring
electronic portfolios into a position of significant instrumentality
in teaching and learning in our department, we would have to evaluate
the whole range of work in terms of its quality, in addition to
looking, as I did, at how well students reflected on and
assembled their reflections in my senior seminar. In
other words, we would need to carry out summative evaluation
in addition to the mainly formative evaluation I have done
thus far. To accomplish this summative individual as well as
program evaluation in the English curriculum, a number of significant
changes in attitude, expectations, procedures, and administration
would be needed. Such changes are already under way in the teacher
education curriculum, driven by external
political forces as well as internal desires for reform.
Whether we can work in individual departments to prepare the ground
for authentic assessment through portfolios is an open
question. If we can, we have an excellent opportunity to change
the direction and emphasis of college teaching to achieve better
guidance of students, more positive attitudes toward learning, more
convincing evidence of our own effectiveness, and more concrete
demonstrations of the value we add to students' lives.