EDU 530 Week 1 Discussion

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Chapter 9

Portfolio Assessment

Chief Chapter Outcome

An understanding not only of the distinctive relationship between measurement and instruction inherent in portfolio assessment, but also of the essentials of a process that teachers can use to install portfolio assessment

Learning Objectives

9.1 Describe both positive and negative features of the relationship between measurement and instruction.

9.2 From memory, identify and explain the key features of a seven-step process that teachers can employ to install portfolio assessment.

9.3 Having identified three different functions of portfolio assessment, isolate the chief strengths and weaknesses of portfolio assessment as a classroom measurement approach.

“Assessment should be a part of instruction, not apart from it” is a point of view most proponents of portfolio assessment would enthusiastically endorse. Portfo- lio assessment, a contemporary entry in the educational measurement derby, has captured the attention of many educators because it represents a clear alternative to more traditional forms of educational testing.

A portfolio is a systematic collection of one’s work. In education, portfolios consist of collections of students’ work. Although the application of portfolios in education has been a relatively recent phenomenon, portfolios have been widely used in a number of other fields for many years. Portfolios, in fact, constitute the chief method by which certain professionals display their skills and accomplish- ments. For example, portfolios are traditionally used for this purpose by photogra- phers, artists, journalists, models, architects, and so on. Although many educators tend to think of portfolios as collections of written works featuring “words on paper,” today’s explosion of technological devices makes it possible for students to

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assemble their work in a variety of electronically retained forms instead of a sheaf of hand-written papers in a manila folder. An important feature of portfolios is that they must be updated as a person’s achievements and skills grow.

Portfolios have been warmly embraced—particularly by many educators who regard traditional assessment practices with scant enthusiasm. In Table 9.1, for example, a classic chart presented by Tierney, Carter, and Desai (1991) indicates what those three authors believe are the differences between portfolio assessment and assessment based on standardized testing tactics.

One of the settings in which portfolio assessment has been used with suc- cess is in the measurement of students with severe disabilities. Such youngsters sometimes encounter insuperable difficulties in displaying their capabilities via more routine sorts of testing. This strength of portfolio assessment, as might be expected, also turns out to be its weakness. As you will see in this chapter, the use of portfolios as a measurement method allows teachers to particularize assess- ment approaches for different students. Such particularization, although it may work well in the case of an individual student, usually leads to different collec- tions of evidence from different students, thus making accurate comparisons of different students’ work—or one student’s work over time—somewhat difficult.

Classroom Portfolio Assessment Versus Large-Scale Portfolio Assessment Classroom Applications Most advocates of portfolio assessment believe the real payoffs for such assess- ment approaches lie in the individual teacher’s classroom, because the relation- ship between instruction and assessment will be strengthened as a consequence

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Table 9.1 DlttssseSsa le aasaaomser OsrSromsa Bsrwsse rsrtrClra led -rledlsdlzsd Tsarler slSrlSsa

Portfolio Testing

Represents the range of reading and writing students are engaged in

Assesses students across a limited range of reading and writing assignments that may not match what students do

Engages students in assessing their progress and/or accomplishments and establishing ongoing learning goals

Mechanically scored or scored by teachers who have little input

Measures each student’s achievement, while allowing for individual differences between students

Assesses all students on the same dimensions

Represents a collaborative approach to assessment Assessment process is not collaborative

Has a goal of student self-assessment Student self-assessment is not a goal

Addresses improvement, effort, and achievement Addresses achievement only

Links assessment and teaching to learning Separates learning, testing, and teaching

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of students’ continuing accumulation of work products in their portfolios. Ideally, teachers who adopt portfolios in their classrooms will make the ongoing collec- tion and appraisal of students’ work a central focus of the instructional program, rather than a peripheral activity whereby students occasionally gather up their work to convince a teacher’s supervisors or students’ parents that good things have been going on in class.

Here’s a description of how an elementary teacher might use portfolios to assess students’ progress in social studies, language arts, and mathematics. The teacher, let’s call him Phil Pholio, asks students to keep three portfolios, one in each of those three subject fields. In each portfolio, the students are to place their early and revised work products. The work products are always dated so that Mr. Pholio, as well as the students themselves, can see what kinds of differences in quality (if any) take place over time. For example, if effective instruction is being provided, there should be discernible improvement in the caliber of students’ written compositions, solutions to mathematics problems, and analyses of social issues.

Three or four times per semester, Mr. Pholio holds a 15- to 20-minute portfolio conference with each student about the three different portfolios. The other, nonconferencing students take part in small-group and inde- pendent learning activities while the portfolio conferences are being con- ducted. During a conference, the participating student plays an active role in evaluating his or her own work. Toward the close of the school year, students select from their regular portfolios a series of work products that not only represent their best final versions, but also indicate how those final products were created. These selections are placed in a display portfolio featured at a spring open-school session designed for parents. Parents who visit the school are urged to take their children’s display portfolios home. Mr. Pholio also sends portfolios home to parents who are unable to attend the open-school event.

There are, of course, many other ways to use portfolios effectively in a classroom. Phil Pholio, our phictitious (sic) teacher, employed a fairly common approach, but a variety of alternative procedures could also work quite nicely. The major consideration is that the teacher uses portfolio assessment as an inte- gral aspect of the instructional process. Because portfolios can be tailored to a specific student’s evolving growth, the ongoing diagnostic value of portfolios for teachers is immense.

Who Is Evaluating Whom? Roger Farr, a leader in language arts instruction and assessment, often contended that the real payoff from proper portfolio assessment is that students’ self-evaluation capabilities are enhanced (1994). Thus, during portfolio conferences the teacher encourages students to come up with personal appraisals of their own work. The conference, then, becomes far more than merely an opportunity for the teacher to dispense an “oral report card.” On the contrary, students’ self-evaluation skills

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are nurtured not only during portfolio conferences, but also throughout the entire school year. For this reason, Farr strongly preferred the term working portfolios to the term showcase portfolios because he believed self-evaluation is nurtured more readily in connection with ongoing reviews of products not intended to impress external viewers.

For self-evaluation purposes, it is particularly useful to be able to compare earlier work with later work. Fortunately, even if a teacher’s instruction is down- right abysmal, students grow older and, as a consequence of maturation, tend to get better at what they do in school. If a student is required to review three versions of her or his written composition (a first draft, a second draft, and a final draft), self-evaluation can be fostered by encouraging the student to make comparative judgments of the three compositions based on a rubric featuring appropriate evaluative criteria. As anyone who has done much writing knows, written efforts tend to get better with time and revision. Contrasting later ver- sions with earlier versions can prove illuminating from an appraisal perspective and, because students’ self-evaluation is so critical to their future growth, from an instructional perspective as well.

Large-Scale Applications It is one thing to use portfolios for classroom assessment; it is quite another to use portfolios for large-scale assessment programs. Several states and large school districts have attempted to install portfolios as a central component of a large-scale accountability assessment program—that is, an evaluation approach in which students’ performances serve as an indicator of an educational system’s effectiveness. To date, the results of efforts to employ portfolios for accountability purposes have not been encouraging.

In large-scale applications of portfolio assessments for accountability pur- poses, students’ portfolios are judged either by the students’ regular teachers or by a cadre of specially trained scorers (often teachers) who carry out the bulk of scoring at a central site. The problem with specially trained scorers and central-site scoring is that it typically costs much more than can be afforded. Some states, therefore, have opted to have all portfolios scored by students’ own teachers, who then relay such scores to the state department. The problem with having regular teachers score students’ portfolios, however, is that such scoring tends to be too unreliable for use in accountability programs. Not only have teachers usually not been provided with thorough training about how to score portfolios, but there is also a tendency for teachers to be biased in favor of their own students. To cope with such problems, sometimes teachers in a school or district evaluate their students’ portfolios, but then a random sample of those portfolios are scored by state officials as an “audit” of the local scoring’s accuracy.

One of the most visible of the statewide efforts to use portfolios on every pupil has been a performance-assessment program in the state of Vermont. Because

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substantial national attention has been focused on the Vermont program, and because it has been evaluated independently, many policymakers in other states have drawn on the experiences encountered in the Vermont Portfolio Assessment Program. Unfortunately, independent evaluators of Vermont’s statewide efforts to use portfolios found that there was considerable unreliability in the apprais- als given to students’ work. And, if you recall the importance of reliability as discussed in Chapter 3, you know that it’s tough to draw valid inferences about students’ achievements if the assessments of those achievements are not yielding consistent results.

But, of course, this is a book about classroom assessment, not large-scale assessment. It certainly hasn’t been shown definitively that portfolios do not have a place in large-scale assessment. What has been shown, however, is that there are significant obstacles to be surmounted if portfolio assessment is going to make a meaningful contribution to large-scale educational accountability testing.

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After a midsummer, schoolwide 3-day workshop on the Instructional Payoffs of Classroom Portfolios, the faculty at Rhoda Street Elementary School have agreed to install student portfolios in all classrooms for one or more subject areas. Maria Martinez, an experienced third-grade teacher in the school, has decided to try out portfolios only in mathematics. She admits to her family (but not to her fellow teachers) that she’s not certain she’ll be able to use portfolios properly with her students.

Because she has attempted to follow guidelines of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Maria stresses mathematical problem solving and the integration of mathematical understanding with content from other disciplines. Accordingly, she asks her students to place in their mathematics portfolios versions of their attempts to solve quantitative problems drawn from other subjects. Maria poses these problems for her third-graders and then instructs them to prepare an initial solution strategy and also revise that solution at least twice. Students are directed to put all solutions (dated) in their portfolios.

Six weeks after the start of school, Maria sets up a series of 15-minute portfolio conferences with her students. During the 3 days on which the portfolio conferences are held, students who are not involved in a conference move through a series of learning stations in other subject areas, where they typically engage in a fair amount of peer critiquing of each other’s responses to various kinds of practice exercises.

Having learned during the summer workshop that the promotion of students’ self-evaluation is critical if students are to get the most from portfolios, Maria devotes the bulk of her 15-minute conferences to students’ personal appraisals of their own work. Although Maria offers some of her own appraisals of most students’ work, she often allows the student’s self-evaluation to override her own estimates of a student’s ability to solve each problem.

Because it will soon be time to give students their 10-week grades, Maria doesn’t know whether to base the grades chiefly on her own judgments or on the students’ self-appraisals.

If you were Maria, what would you decide to do?

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Seven Key Ingredients in Classroom Portfolio Assessment Although there are numerous ways to install and sustain portfolios in a class- room, you will find that the following seven-step sequence provides a reason- able template for getting underway with portfolio assessment. Taken together, these seven activities capture the key ingredients in classroom-based portfolio assessment.

1. Make sure your students “own” their portfolios. In order for portfolios to represent a student’s evolving work accurately, and to foster the kind of self-evaluation so crucial if portfolios are to be truly educational, students must perceive portfolios to be collections of their own work, and not merely temporary receptacles for products that their teacher ultimately grades. You will probably want to introduce the notion of portfolio as- sessment to your students (assuming portfolio assessment isn’t already a schoolwide operation and your students aren’t already steeped in the use of portfolios) by explaining the distinctive functions of portfolios in the classroom.

2. Decide what kinds of work samples to collect. Various kinds of work samples can be included in a portfolio. Obviously, such products will vary from subject to subject. In general, a substantial variety of work products is preferable to a limited range of work products. However, for portfolios organized around students’ mastery of a particularly limited curricular aim, it may be preferable to include only a single kind of work product. Ideally, you and your students can collaboratively determine what goes in the portfolio.

3. Collect and store work samples. Students need to collect the designated work samples as they are created, place them in a suitable container (a folder or notebook, for example), and then store the container in a file cabinet, storage box, or some other safe location. You may need to work individually with your students to help them decide whether particular products should be placed in their portfolios. The actual organization of a portfolio’s contents depends, of course, on the nature of the work samples being collected. For instance, today’s rapidly evolving digital technology will surely present a range of new options for creating electronic portfolios.

4. Select criteria by which to evaluate portfolio work samples. Working collaboratively with students, carve out a set of criteria by which you and your students can judge the quality of your students’ portfolio products. Because of the likely diversity of products in different students’ portfolios, the identification of evaluative criteria will not be a simple task. Yet, unless at least rudimentary evaluative criteria are isolated, the students will find it difficult to evaluate their own efforts and, thereafter, to strive for improvement. The criteria, once selected, should be described with the same sort of clarity we saw in Chapter 8

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regarding how to employ a rubric’s evaluative criteria when judging students’ responses to performance test tasks. Once students realize that the evaluative criteria will be employed to appraise their own work, most students get into these criteria-appraisal sessions with enthusiasm.

5. Require students to evaluate their own portfolio products continually. Using the agreed-on evaluative criteria, be sure your students routinely appraise their own work. Students can be directed to evaluate their work products holistically, analytically, or using a combination of both approaches. Such self-evaluation can be made routine by requiring each student to complete brief evaluation slips on cards on which they identify the major strengths and weaknesses of a given product and then suggest how the product could be improved. Be sure to have your students date such self-evaluation sheets so they can keep track of modifications in their self-evaluation skills. Each completed self-evaluation sheet should be stapled or paper-clipped to the work product being evaluated. For digital portfolios, of course, comparable electronic actions would be undertaken.

6. Schedule and conduct portfolio conferences. Portfolio conferences take time. Yet these interchange sessions between teachers and students regarding students’ work are really pivotal in making sure portfolio assessment fulfills its poten- tial. The conference should not only evaluate your students’ work products, but should also help them improve their self-evaluation abilities. Try to hold as many of these conferences as you can. In order to make the conferences time efficient, be sure to have students prepare for the conferences so you can start right in on the topics of most concern to you and the students.

7. Involve parents in the portfolio-assessment process. Early in the school year, make sure your students’ parents understand the nature of the portfolio-assessment process that you’ve devised for your classroom. Insofar as is practical, encour- age your students’ parents/guardians periodically to review their children’s work samples, as well as their children’s self-evaluation of those work sam- ples. The more active that parents become in reviewing their children’s work, the stronger the message will be to the child indicating the portfolio activity is really worthwhile. If you wish, you may have students select their best work for a showcase portfolio or, instead, you may simply use the students’ working portfolios.

These seven steps reflect only the most important activities that teachers might engage in when creating assessment programs in their classrooms. There are obviously all sorts of variations and embellishments possible.

There’s one situation in which heavy student involvement in the portfolio process may not make instructional sense. This occurs in the early grades when, in the teacher’s judgment, those little tykes are not developmentally ready to take a meaningful hand in a full-blown portfolio self-evaluation extravaganza. Any sort of educational assessment ought to be developmentally appropriate for the students who are being assessed. Thus, for students who are in early primary grades, a

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teacher may sensibly decide to employ only showcase portfolios to display a child’s accomplishments to the child and the child’s parents. Working portfolios, simply bristling with student-evaluated products, can be left for later. This is, clearly, a teacher’s call.

Purposeful Portfolios There are numerous choice-points you’ll encounter if you embark on a portfolio-assessment approach in your own classroom. The first one ought to revolve around purpose. Why is it that you are contemplating a meaningful prance down the portfolio pathway?

Assessment specialists typically identify three chief purposes for portfolio assessment. The first of these is documentation of student progress, wherein the major function of the assembled work samples is to provide the student, the teacher, and the student’s parents with evidence about the student’s growth—or lack of it. Such working portfolios provide meaningful opportunities for self-evaluation by students.

Pointing out that students’ achievement levels ought to influence teach- ers’ instructional decisions, Anderson (2003) concluded that “the information should be collected as close to the decision as possible (e.g., final examinations are administered in close proximity to end-of-term grades). However, if decisions are to be based on learning, then a plan for information collection over time must be developed and implemented” (p. 44). The more current any documentation of students’ progress is, the more accurate such documentation is apt to be.

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From an instructional perspective, the really special advantage of portfolio assessment is that its recurrent assessment of the student’s status with respect to mastery of one or more demanding skills provides both teachers and stu- dents with assessment-informed opportunities to make any needed adjustments in what they are currently doing. Later in Chapter 12, we will be considering the instructional dividends of the formative-assessment process. Because of its recurring assessment of students’ evolving mastery of skills, portfolio assessment practically forces teachers to engage in a classroom instructional process closely resembling formative assessment.

A second purpose of portfolios is to provide an opportunity for showcasing student accomplishments. Chappuis and Stiggins (2017) have described portfolios that showcase students’ best work as celebration portfolios, and they contend that celebration portfolios are especially appropriate for the early grades. In portfolios intended to showcase student accomplishments, students typically select their best work and reflect thoughtfully on its quality.

One teacher in the Midwest always makes sure students include the follow- ing elements in their showcase portfolios:

• A letter of introduction to portfolio reviewers

• A table of contents

• Identification of the skills or knowledge being demonstrated

• A representative sample of the student’s best work

• Dates on all entries

• The evaluative criteria (or rubric) being used

• The student’s self-reflection on all entries

Student self-reflections about the entries in portfolios is a pivotal ingredient in showcase portfolios. Some portfolio proponents contend that a portfolio’s self-evaluation by the student helps the learner learn better and permits the reader of the portfolio to gain insights about how the learner learns.

A final purpose for portfolios is evaluation of student status—that is, the determination of whether students have met previously determined quality levels of performance. McMillan (2018) points out that when portfolios are used for this purpose, there must be greater standardization about what should be included in a portfolio and how the work samples should be appraised. Typically, teachers select the entries for this kind of portfolio, and consider- able attention is given to scoring, so that any rubrics employed to score the portfolios will yield consistent results even if different scorers are involved. For portfolios being used to evaluate student status, there is usually less need for self-evaluation of entries—unless such self-evaluations are themselves being evaluated by others.

Well, we’ve peeked at three purposes underlying portfolio assessment. Can one portfolio perform all three functions? Many teachers who have used portfolios will supply a somewhat shaky yes. But if you were to ask those teachers whether

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one portfolio can perform all three functions well, you ought to get a rock-solid no. The three functions, though somewhat related—rather like annoying second cousins—are fundamentally different.

That’s why your very first decision, if you’re going to install portfolios in your classroom, is to decide on the primary purpose of the portfolios. You can then more easily determine what the portfolios should look like and how students should prepare them.

Scriptural scholars sometime tell us that “No man can serve two masters.” Similarly, one kind of portfolio cannot blithely satisfy multiple functions. Some classroom teachers rush into portfolio assessment because they’ve heard about all of the enthralling things that portfolios can do. But one kind of portfolio cannot easily fulfill multiple functions. Pick your top-priority purpose and then build a portfolio assessment to satisfy this purpose well.

Work-Sample Selection For a teacher just joining the portfolio party, another key decision hinges on identifying the work samples to be put into the portfolios. All too often, teachers who are novices at portfolio assessment will fail to think divergently enough about the kinds of entries that should constitute a portfolio’s chief contents.

But divergency is not necessarily a virtue when it comes to the determination of a portfolio’s contents. You shouldn’t search for varied kinds of work samples simply for the sake of variety. What’s important is that the particular kinds of work samples to be included in the portfolio will allow you to derive valid infer- ences about the skills and/or knowledge you’re trying to have your students master. It’s far better to include a few kinds of inference-illuminating work samples than to include a galaxy of work samples, many of which do not contribute to your interpretations regarding students’ knowledge or skills.

Remember, as you saw earlier in this text, really rapturous educational assessment requires that the assessment procedure being employed must exhibit validity, reliability, and fairness. The need to satisfy this trio of measurement criteria does not instantly disappear into the ether when portfolio assessment is adopted. Yes, you still need evidence of valid assessment-based interpretations for the portfolio assessment’s intended use. Yes, you still need evidence that your chosen assessment technique yields accurate and reliable scores. And, yes, you still need evidence attesting to the fundamental fairness of your portfolio assessment.

One of the most common shortcomings of teachers who, for the first time, hop into the deep end of the portfolio-assessment pool is the tendency for teachers to let students’ raw “smarts” or their family affluence rule the day. That is, if the teacher has not done a crackerjack job in clarifying the evaluative criteria by which to evaluate students’ efforts, then when portfolios are created and subsequently evaluated, students who inherited jolly good cerebral genes, or whose families

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are more socioeconomically affluent, will be seen as the winners. Putting it dif- ferently, the danger is that students’ portfolios will be evaluated dominantly by what students are bringing to the instructional situation, not by what they have gained from it. To guard against this understandable bias—after all, what sensible teacher does not groove on good-looking and content-loaded portfolios—it is often useful for the teacher to adopt a mental trio of review “lenses” through which to consider a student’s evolving and, finally, completed portfolio. As always, try to focus on all three of the sanctioned facets of educational testing: validity, reliabil- ity, and fairness. With this assessment trinity constantly in your mind, odds are that you can spot, and then jettison, instances of portfolio invalidity, unreliability, and unfairness.

Because of the atypicality of portfolio assessment, however, coming up with such evidence is often more challenging than when relying on more conventional sorts of tests. Challenging or not, however, the “big three” still apply to portfolio assessment with their customary force. For a portfolio-assessment system to have the desired punch, it must be accompanied by meaningful evidence bearing on its validity, reliability, and fairness.

Appraising Portfolios As indicated earlier in the chapter, students’ portfolios are almost always evalu- ated by the use of a rubric. The most important ingredients of such a rubric are its evaluative criteria—that is, the factors to be used in determining the quality of a particular student’s portfolio. If there’s any sort of student self-evaluation to be done, and such self-evaluation is almost always desirable, then it is imperative that students have access to, and thoroughly understand, the rubric that will be used to evaluate their portfolios.

As you’ll see when we treat formative assessment in Chapter 12, for certain applications of formative assessment, students must definitely understand the rubrics (and those rubrics’ evaluative criteria). However, for all forms of portfolio assessment, students’ familiarity with rubrics is imperative.

Here’s one quick-and-dirty way to appraise any sort of portfolio assess- ments you might install in your classroom. Simply ask yourself whether your students’ portfolios have substantially increased the accuracy of the inferences you make regarding your students’ skills and knowledge. If your answer is yes, then portfolio assessment is a winner for you. If your answer is no, then pitch those portfolios without delay—or guilt. But wait! If your answer resembles “I’m not sure,” then you really need to think this issue through rigorously and, quite possibly, collect more evidence bearing on the accuracy of portfolio-based inferences. Classroom assessment is supposed to contribute to more valid infer- ences from which better instructional decisions can be made. If your portfolio- assessment program isn’t clearly doing those things, you may need to make some serious changes in that program.

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The Pros and Cons of Portfolio Assessment You must keep in mind that portfolio assessment’s greatest strength is that it can be tailored to the individual student’s needs, interests, and abilities. Yet, portfolio assessment suffers from the drawback faced by all constructed-response mea- surement. Students’ constructed responses are genuinely difficult to evaluate, particularly when those responses vary from student to student.

As was seen in Vermont’s Portfolio Assessment Program, it is quite dif- ficult to come up with consistent evaluations of different students’ portfolios. Sometimes the scoring guides devised for use in evaluating portfolios are so terse and so general as to be almost useless. They’re akin to Rorschach inkblots, in which different scorers see in the scoring guide what they want to see. In contrast, some scoring guides are so detailed and complicated that they simply overwhelm scorers. It is difficult to devise scoring guides that embody just the right level of specificity. Generally speaking, most teachers are so busy they don’t have time to create elaborate scoring schemes. Accordingly, many teach- ers (and students) sometimes find themselves judging portfolios by employing fairly loose evaluative criteria. Such criteria tend to be interpreted differently by different people.

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Another problem with portfolio assessment is it takes time—loads of time— to carry out properly. Even if you’re very efficient in reviewing your students’ portfolios, you’ll still have to devote many hours both in class (during portfolio conferences) and outside of class (if you also wish to review your students’ port- folios by yourself). Proponents of portfolios are convinced that the quality of portfolio assessment is worth the time such assessment takes. You at least need to be prepared for the required investment of time if you decide to undertake portfolio assessment. And teachers will surely need to receive sufficient training to learn how to carry out portfolio assessment well. Any teachers who set out to do portfolio assessment by simply stuffing student stuff into containers built for stuff stuffing will end up wasting their time and their students’ time. Meaningful professional development is a must whenever portfolio assessment is to work well. If several teachers in a school will be using portfolio assessment in their classes, this would be a marvelous opportunity to establish a teacher learning com- munity in which, on a continuing basis during the year, portfolio-using teachers meet to share insights and work collaboratively on common problems.

Bsr Whlr Drsa Thla hlvs rr Dr wlrh TslShler? Portfolio assessment almost always fundamentally changes a teacher’s approach to instruction. A nifty little selected-response test, or even a lengthy constructed-response exam, can usually be incorporated into a teacher’s ongoing instructional program without significantly altering how the teacher goes about teaching. But that’s not so with portfolio assessment. Once a teacher hops aboard the portfolio hay wagon, there’s a long and serious ride in the offing.

Portfolio assessment, if it’s properly focused on helping children improve by evaluating their own work samples, becomes a continuing and central component of a teacher’s instructional program. Work samples have to be chosen, scoring rubrics need to be developed, and students need to be taught how to use those rubrics to monitor the evolving quality of their efforts. Portfolio assessment, therefore, truly dominates most instructional programs in which it is employed.

The first thing you need to do is decide whether the knowledge and skills you are trying to have your students master (especially the skills) lend themselves to portfolio assessment.

Will there be student work samples that, because they permit you to make accurate interpretations about your students’ evolving skill mastery, could provide the continuing focus for portfolio assessment?

Some content lends itself delightfully to portfolio assessment. Some doesn’t. During my first year as a high school teacher, I taught two English courses and a speech class. Because my English courses focused on the promotion of students’ composition skills, I now believe that a portfolio-assessment strategy might have worked well in either English course. My students and I could have monitored their improvements in being able to write.

But I don’t think I could have used portfolios effectively in my speech class. At that time, television itself had just arrived on the West Coast, and videotaping was unknown. Accordingly, my speech students and I wouldn’t have had anything to toss into their portfolios.

The first big question you need to ask yourself, when it comes to portfolio assessment, is quite simple: Does this powerful but time-consuming form of assessment seem suitable for what I’m trying to teach?

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On the plus side, however, most teachers who have used portfolios agree that portfolio assessment provides a strategy for documenting and evaluating growth happening in a classroom in ways that standardized or written tests can- not. Portfolios have the potential to create authentic portraits of what students learn. Stiggins (2017) contends that for portfolios to merge effectively with instruc- tion, they must have a story to tell. Fortunately, this story can be made compatible with improved student learning.

If you speak with many of the teachers who use portfolio assessments, you’ll often find that they are primarily enamored of two of its payoffs. They believe that the self-evaluation it fosters in students is truly important in guiding students’ learning over time. They also think that the personal ownership students experience regarding their own work—and the progress they experience—makes the benefits of portfolio assessment outweigh its costs.

What Do Classroom Teachers Really Need to Know About Portfolio Assessment? As noted at the beginning of this book’s four-chapter foray into item types, the more familiar you are with different kinds of test items, the more likely you will be to select an item type that best provides you with the information you need in order to draw suitable inferences about your students. Until recently, portfolios haven’t been viewed as a viable assessment option by many teachers. These days, however, port- folio assessment is increasingly regarded as a legitimate tactic in a teacher’s assess- ment strategy. And, as noted earlier in the chapter, portfolio assessment appears to be particularly applicable to the assessment of students with severe disabilities.

You need to realize that if portfolio assessment is going to constitute a helpful adjunct to your instructional program, portfolios will have to become a central, not a tangential, part of what goes on in your classroom. The primary premise in port- folio assessment is that a particularized collection of a student’s evolving work will allow both the student and you to determine the student’s progress. You can’t gauge the student’s progress if you don’t have frequent evidence of the student’s efforts.

It would be educationally unwise to select portfolio assessment as a one-time measurement approach to deal with a short-term instructional objective. Rather, it makes more sense to select some key curricular aim, such as the student’s abil- ity to write original compositions, and then monitor this aspect of the student’s learning throughout the entire school year. It is also important to remember that although portfolio assessment may prove highly valuable for classroom instruc- tion and measurement purposes, at this juncture there is insufficient evidence that it can be used appropriately for large-scale assessment.

A number of portfolio-assessment specialists believe that the most important dividend from portfolio assessment is the increased ability of students to evaluate

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their own work. If this becomes one of your goals in a portfolio-assessment approach, you must be certain to nurture such self-evaluation growth deliberately via portfo- lios, instead of simply using portfolios as convenient collections of work samples.

The seven key ingredients in portfolio assessment that were identified in the chapter represent only one way of installing this kind of assessment strategy. Variations of those seven suggested procedures are not only possible, but also to be encouraged. The big thing to keep in mind is that portfolio assessment offers your students, and you, a way to particularize your evaluation of each student’s growth over time. And, speaking of time, it’s only appropriate to remind you that it takes substantially more time to use a portfolio-assessment approach properly than to score a zillion true–false tests. If you opt to try portfolio assessment, you’ll have to see whether, in your own instructional situation, it yields sufficient educa- tional benefits to be worth the investment you’ll surely need to make in it.

lsser TlCk Suppose that Mr. and Mrs. Holmgren, parents of your student, Harry, stopped by your classroom during a back-to-school night to examine their son’s portfolio. After spending almost 30 minutes going through the portfolio and skimming the portfolios of several other students, they speak to you—not with hostility, but with genuine confusion. Mrs. Holmgren sums up their concerns nicely with the following comments: “When we stopped by Mr. Bray’s classroom earlier this evening to see how our daughter, Elissa, is doing, we encountered a series of extremely impressive portfolios. Elissa’s was outstanding. To be honest, our son, Harry’s portfolio is a lot less polished. It seems that he’s included everything he’s ever done in your class, rough drafts as well as final products. Why is there this difference?”

If I were you, here’s how I’d respond to Harry’s parents:

“It’s really good that you two could take the time to see how Harry and Elissa are doing. And I can understand why you’re perplexed by the differences between Elissa’s and Harry’s portfolios. You see, there are different kinds of student portfolios, and different portfolios serve different purposes.

“In Mr. Bray’s class, and I know this because we often exchange portfolio tips with one another during regular meetings of our teacher learning

community, students prepare what are called showcase portfolios. In such portfolios, students pick their very best work to show Mr. Bray and their parents what they’ve learned. I think Mr. Bray actually sent his students’ showcase portfolios home about a month ago so you could see how well Elissa is doing. For Mr. Bray and his students, the portfolios are collections of best work that, in a very real sense, celebrate students’ achievements.

“In my class, however, students create working portfolios in which the real emphasis is on getting students to make progress and to evaluate this progress on their own. When you reviewed Harry’s portfolio, did you see how each entry is dated and how he had prepared a brief self-reflection of each entry? I’m more interested in Harry’s seeing the improvement he makes than in anyone seeing just polished final products. You, too, can see the striking progress he’s made over the course of this school year.

“I’m not suggesting that my kind of portfolio is better than Mr. Bray’s. Both have a role to play. Those roles, as I’m sure you’ll see, are quite different.”

Now, how would you respond to Mr. and Mrs. Holmgren?

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Chapter Summary After defining portfolios as systematic collections of students’ work, contrasts were drawn between portfolio assessment and more conventional test- ing. It was suggested that portfolio assessment is far more appropriate for an individual teach- er’s classroom assessment than for large-scale accountability assessments.

An emphasis on self-assessment was suggested as being highly appropriate for port- folio assessment, particularly in view of the way portfolios can be tailored to an individual student’s evolving progress. Seven steps were then suggested as key ingredients for classroom teachers to install and sustain portfolio assess- ment in their classroom: (1) establish student own- ership, (2) decide what work samples to collect,

(3) collect and score work samples, (4) select evaluative criteria, (5) require continual student self-evaluations, (6) schedule and conduct port- folio conferences, and (7) involve parents in the portfolio-assessment process.

Three different functions of portfolio assess- ment were identified—namely, documentation of student progress, showcasing of student accom- plishments, and evaluation of student status. Teachers were urged to select a primary purpose for portfolio assessment.

The chapter concluded with an identification of plusses and minuses of portfolio assessment. It was emphasized that portfolio assessment rep- resents an important measurement strategy now available to today’s classroom teachers.

References Anderson, L. W. (2003). Classroom assessment:

Enhancing the quality of teacher decision making. Erlbaum.

Andrade, H. L. (2019). A critical review of research on student self-assessment. Frontiers. Retrieved September 20, 2022, from https:// www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ feduc.2019.00087/full

Belgrad, S. E. (2013). Portfolios and e-portfolios: Student reflection, self-assessment, and goal setting in the learning process. In J. H. McMillan (Ed.), SAGE Handbook of research on classroom assessment (pp. 331–346). SAGE Publications.

Chappuis, J., & Stiggins, R. J. (2017). An introduction to student-involved classroom assessment for learning (7th ed.). Pearson.

Farr, R. (1994). Portfolio and performance assessment: Helping students evaluate their progress as readers and writers (2nd ed.). Harcourt Brace & Co.

Farr, R. (1997). Portfolio & performance assessment language. Harcourt Brace & Co.

Hertz, M. B. (2020, January 6). Tools for creating digital student portfolios. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/ tool s-creating-digital-student-portfolios

McMillan, J. H. (2018). Classroom assessment: Principles and practice for effective standards-based instruction (7th ed.). Pearson.

Miller, M. D., & Linn, R. (2013). Measurement and assessment in teaching (11th ed.). Pearson.

Tierney, R. J., Carter, M. A., & Desai, L. E. (1991). Portfolio assessment in the reading-writing classroom. Christopher-Gordon.

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A Testing Takeaway

Portfolio Assessment: Finding a Sustainable Focus* W. James Popham, University of California, Los Angeles

A portfolio is a systematic collection of one’s work. In education, portfolios are systematic collections of a student’s work products—and portfolio assessment is the appraisal of a student’s evolving skills based on those collected products. Although a few states have attempted to use portfolio assessment in a statewide accountability system, the inability to arrive at sufficiently reliable scores for students’ work products has led to portfolio assessment’s being used almost exclusively at the classroom level.

Classroom portfolio assessment takes time and energy, both from the teacher and from the teacher’s students. Everyone can get worn out making classroom portfolio assessment work. Yet classroom portfolio assessment can promote genuinely important learning outcomes for students. Accordingly, the challenge is to select a sustainable structure for classroom portfolio assessment.

Teachers who report the most success when employing portfolio assessment in their classrooms often focus their instructional efforts on enhancing their students’ self-evaluation abilities. Depending on the skill(s) being promoted, a long-term collection of a student’s evolving work products typically emerges—and those products can then be subjected to a student’s use of whatever evaluative system has been adopted. Over time, then, and with suitable guidance from the teacher, students’ self-evaluation skills are often seriously sharpened.

One of the most common targets for portfolio assessment is the improvement of students’ composition skills. Although portfolio assessment can be used in many other content arenas, let’s use composition as an example.

Early on, after the teacher explains the structure of the portfolio-evaluation system, the teacher describes the rubric—that is, the scoring guide to be employed in evaluating students’ compositions. Scrutiny of the rubric allows students to become conversant with the criteria to be used as they evaluate their own compositions. Thereafter, at designated intervals, portfolio conferences are scheduled between each student and the teacher. These conferences are frequently led by students in evaluating their portfolio’s work products.

Many teachers who employ this approach to portfolio assessment report meaningful success in promoting their students’ self-evaluation skills. Yet some teachers who have attempted to use portfolio assessment have abandoned the process simply because it takes too much time. It is the teacher’s challenge, then, to devise a way to assess portfolios that is truly sustainable, year after year, so the substantial dividends of portfolio assessment can be achieved while, at the same time, maintaining the teacher’s sanity.

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