Professional Documents
Culture Documents
7 Portfolio
Assessment
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
1. Explain the role of portfolio assessment as an alternative
assessment strategy;
2. Explain the methods to assess portfolios;
3. List the advantages and disadvantages of portfolios; and
4. Determine how and when portfolios should be assessed.
INTRODUCTION
In the previous topic, we discussed the role of projects and practical assignments
in the assessment of student learning. In this topic, we will examine another type
of assessment tool commonly used in assessing student learning in certain
subject areas. The assessment tool is portfolio assessment. Educators are always
observing behaviour in the classroom and making decisions based on their
observations. Oral tests which are often used in the language arts are becoming a
popular evaluation technique in other subject areas. Increasingly, portfolio
assessment, an authentic assessment method, is gaining importance as an
assessment strategy seeking to present a more holistic view of the learner. A
portfolio is not simply a collection of all students work. It is neither a scrapbook
nor a dumping ground for all students accomplishments.
The particular purposes of portfolio determine the number and type of items to
be included, the process for selecting the items, how and whether students
respond to the items selected. According to Paulson, Paulson and Meyer (1991),
portfolios offer a way of assessing student learning that is different from
traditional methods. Portfolio assessment provides the teacher and students an
opportunity to observe students in a broader context: taking risks, developing
creative solutions, and learning to make judgements about their own
performances (p. 63).
Portfolios typically are created for one of three purposes; to show growth, to
showcase current abilities, and to evaluate cumulative achievement. Many
educators who work with portfolios consider the reflection component the most
critical element of a good portfolio. Simply selecting samples of work can
produce meaningful stories about students, and others can benefit from
reading these stories.
The students themselves are missing significant benefits of the portfolio process
if they are not asked to reflect upon the quality and growth of their work. As
Paulson, Paulson and Meyer stated, The portfolio is something that is done by
the student, not to the student. Most importantly, it is something done for the
student. The student needs to be directly involved in each phase of the portfolio
development to learn the most from it, and the reflection phase holds the most
promise for promoting student growth.
The portfolio provides for continuous and ongoing assessment (i.e. formative
assessment) as well as assessment at the end of a semester or a year (i.e.
summative assessment). Emphasis is more on monitoring students progress
towards achieving the learning outcomes of a particular subject, course or
programme. Portfolio assessment has been described as multidimensional
because it allows students to include different aspects of their works such as
essays, project reports, performance on objective tests, objects or artefacts they
have produced, poems, laboratory reports and so forth. In other words, the
portfolio contains samples of work over an entire semester, term or year, rather
than single points in time, such as during examination week only.
(a) Allows the teacher to see the student as an individual, each with his or her
own unique characteristics, needs and strengths. Since assessment
portfolios are individualized, students and teachers have the opportunity to
choose the documents they want to include in the portfolio and to make
decisions about how to improve the students work;
(c) Helps students to be more accountable for their work. Portfolio assessment
can hold students accountable for mastering content standards in a subject
area. Portfolios offer students tangible evidence to show their academic
achievements as well as their participation in community service projects;
(e) Involves students in the assessment process. As students judge their work
using explicit criteria to identify strengths and weaknesses, they are
monitoring their own progress; and
(f) Invites students to reflect upon their growth and performance as learners.
Assessment portfolios require students to continuously reflect and perform
self-evaluations of their work. Teachers should convey to students the
purpose of the portfolio, what constitutes quality work and how the
portfolio is graded. Feedback enables learners to reflect on what they are
learning and why.
However, Epstein (2006) also listed some of the problems with portfolio
assessment. Portfolio assessments may be less reliable because they tend to be
more qualitative rather than quantitative. Society is still strongly oriented
towards grades and test scores and in addition, most universities and colleges
still use test scores and grades as the main admission criteria. Also, portfolio
assessment may be time-consuming for teachers and data from portfolio
assessments can be difficult to analyse.
(a) Process-Oriented Portfolios These portfolios tell a story about the student
and how the learner has grown. It will include earlier drafts and how these
drafts have been improved upon. For example, the first draft of a poem
written by a Year Three student is reworked based on the comments by the
teacher and the student reflecting on his or her work. All the drafts and
changes made are kept in the portfolio. In this manner, student works can
be compared by providing evidence of how the students skills have
improved.
(a) Collection: This step simply requires students to collect and store all of
their work. Students have to get used to the idea of documenting and
saving their work which they may not have done before.
(c) Reflection: This is the most important step in the portfolio process. It is
reflection that differentiates the portfolio from a mere collection of student
work. Reflection is often done in writing but it can also be done orally.
Students are asked why they have chosen a particular product or work (e.g.
essay); and how it compares with other works, what particular skills and
knowledge were used to produce it (e.g. the essay) and how it can be
further improved.
(i) Should students reflect on how or why they chose certain works? and
(vi) Giving students the opportunity to have extensive imput into the
learning process; and
To them the faults of the portfolio assessment are due to the lack of
standardisation, difficulty to implement for large-scale assessment and
potential for personal bias. Therefore, the main disadvantages are:
(i) Extra time needed to plan an assessment system and conduct the
assessment especially for large assessment;
(ii) The gathering of all the necessary data and work samples can make
portfolios bulky and difficult to manage;
The portfolio is more than just a collection of student work. The teacher may
assess and assign grades to the process of assembling and reflecting upon the
portfolio of a students work. The students might have also included reflections
on growth, on strengths and weaknesses, on goals that were or are to be set, on
why certain samples tell a certain story about them, or on why the contents
reflect sufficient progress to indicate completion of designated standards. Some
of the process skills may also be part of the teachers or schools or districts
standards. So, the portfolio provides some evidence of attainment of those
standards. Any or all of these elements can be evaluated and/or graded.
ACTIVITY 7.1
The definition of oral assessment has been widened to include the assessment
of content.
Teachers need to know the benefits and weaknesses of portfolios and use
them to help in students learning.
The portfolio provides for continuous and ongoing assessment (i.e. formative
assessment) as well as assessment at the end of a semester or a year (i.e.
summative assessment).
Paulson F. L., Paulson, P. R., & Meyer, C. (1991). What makes a portfolio a
portfolio? Educational Leadership, 48, 1, 6063.