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1. What are the key points and main ideas? This is an EDUCATION…
1. What are the key points and main ideas?
This is an EDUCATION 450 question.
Portfolio assessment is based on the idea that a collection of a learner’s work throughout the year is one of the best ways to show both final achievement and the effort put into getting there. You are probably already familiar with the idea of a portfolio. Painters, fashion designers, artisans, and writers assemble portfolios that embody their best work. Television and radio announcers compile videotaped and audiotaped excerpts of their best performances that are presented when interviewing for a job. A portfolio is their way of showing what they can really do.
Classroom portfolios serve a similar purpose. They show off a learner’s best writing, artwork, science projects, historical thinking, or mathematical achievement. They also show the steps the learner took to get there. They compile the learner’s best work, but they also include the works in progress: the early drafts, test runs, pilot studies, or preliminary trials. Thus, they are an ideal way to assess final mastery, effort, reflection, and growth in learning that tell the learner’s “story” of achievement over time (Reynolds & Davis, 2013).
The idea of classroom portfolio assessment has gained considerable support and momentum in recent years. Many school districts use portfolios and other types of exhibitions to help motivate effort and show achievement and growth in learning. While the reliability and validity of a classroom teacher’s judgments are always a matter of concern, they are less so when the teacher has multiple opportunities to interact with learners and numerous occasions to observe their work and confirm judgments about their capabilities.
In this section, we will first clarify what portfolio assessment is. Then, we will cover the most significant design considerations: deciding on the purpose of the portfolio; the cognitive outcomes to be assessed; who will plan it; what products to include; the criteria for assessing outcomes; the data that need to be collected to document progress, effort, and achievement; the logistics of where the products are kept; and, finally, how collaborative feedback will be given.
RATIONALE FOR THE PORTFOLIO
We believe that a portfolio’s greatest potential is for showing teachers, parents, and learners a richer array of what students know and can do than paper-and-pencil tests and other “snapshot” assessments. If designed properly, portfolios can show a learner’s ability to think and to solve problems, to use strategies and procedural-type skills, and to construct knowledge. In addition, they also tell something about a learner’s persistence, effort, willingness to change, skill in monitoring his or her own learning, and ability to be self-reflective. One purpose for a portfolio is to give a teacher the information about a learner’s growth over time that no other measurement tool can provide.
There are other reasons for using portfolios. Portfolios are also means to communicate to parents and other teachers the level of achievement that a learner has reached. Report card grades give us some idea of this, but portfolios supplement grades by showing parents, teachers, and learners the supporting evidence.
Portfolios are not an alternative to paper-and-pencil tests, essay tests, or performance tests. Each of those tools possesses validity for a purpose not served by a different tool. If you want to assess a learner’s factual knowledge base (as discussed in Chapter 7), then objective-type tests are appropriate. If you are interested in a snapshot assessment of how well a learner uses a cognitive strategy, there are ways to do this that don’t involve the work required for portfolio assessment. But if you want to assess both achievement and growth in an authentic context, portfolios are a tool that you should consider.
Finally, portfolios are a way to motivate learners to higher levels of effort. They provide a seamless link between classroom teaching and assessment in a way that is consistent with modern cognitive theories of learning and instruction.
Ensuring Validity of the Portfolio
Let’s say that one of the goals you have for the portfolio is to assess how well learners can communicate to a variety of audiences. However, you collect only formal samples of writing of the type you would submit to a literary journal. Or you want your math portfolio to assess growth in problem-solving ability. Yet, your evaluation criteria place too heavy an emphasis on the final solution. These are some of the pitfalls that can undermine the validity of the portfolio. In general, you need to address three challenges to validity: representativeness, rubrics, and relevance.
Representativeness
The best way to ensure representativeness is to be clear at the outset about the cognitive learning skills and dispositions that you want to assess and to require a variety of products that reflect these. You want the samples of writing, scientific thinking, mathematical problem solving, or woodworking to reflect the higher-order thinking skills, procedural skills, or dispositions that you want the portfolio to measure.
Rubrics
You have already had practice at designing rubrics in Chapters 8 and 9. The same considerations for designing clear criteria to assess complex essay items, performances, or demonstrations also apply to assessing portfolios. You will want criteria for assessing both individual entries and the portfolio as a whole. You can accomplish this by developing carefully articulated scoring systems, called rubrics (Burke, 2010). By giving careful consideration to rubrics, you can develop a scoring system that minimizes the arbitrariness of your judgments while holding learners to high standards of achievement. We will look at some important considerations for developing portfolio rubrics shortly.
Relevance
Assembling the portfolio shouldn’t demand abilities of the learner extraneous to the ones you want to assess. A second-grade geography portfolio whose purpose is to reflect skill in map making shouldn’t demand fine motor skills beyond what you would expect a 7-year-old to possess. Likewise, a junior high school science portfolio designed to reflect problem-solvingmap-making shouldn’t require the reading of scientific journals that are beyond the ability of a ninth ninth-gradergrader to understand. Measurement devices often fail to measure what they intend to measure (i.e., lack validity) because they require learner skills that are extraneous to those the instrument was built to measure.
DEVELOPING PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENTS
Now that you’ve given some consideration to validity, let’s get started on building a system for portfolio assessment for your teaching area.
Step 1: Deciding on the Purposes for a Portfolio
Have your learners think about their purpose in assembling a portfolio. Having learners identify for themselves the purpose of the portfolio is one way to increase the authenticity of the task. We encourage you to use this as part of your teaching strategy. However, your learners’ purposes for the portfolio (e.g., getting a job with the local news station) won’t necessarily coincide with yours (e.g., evaluating student learning and your teaching). In this section, we discuss how to be clear about your purposes at the outset of portfolio design.
Classroom-level purposes that portfolios can achieve include the following:
Monitoring student progress or growth over time.
Communicating what has been learned to parents.
Passing on information to subsequent teachers.
Evaluating how well something was taught.
Showing off what has been accomplished.
Assigning a course grade.
Step 2: Identifying Cognitive Skills and Dispositions
Portfolios, like performance assessments, are intended to be measures of deep understanding and genuine achievement. They can measure growth and development of competence in areas like knowledge construction (e.g., knowledge organization), cognitive strategies (analysis, interpretation, planning, organizing, and revising), procedural skills (clear communication, editing, drawing, speaking, and building), and metacognition (self-monitoring and self-reflection) as well as certain dispositionsor habits of mindsuch as flexibility, adaptability, acceptance of criticism, persistence, collaboration, and desire for mastery. The Common Core State Standards, or CCSS (or state academic standards in states that do not adopt the CCSS), identify outcomes that leaders have identified as important for your grade. The CCSS-aligned tests are designed to assess for those outcomes. This text also has provided you with practice in specifying different types of cognitive outcomes and in planning to assess them. As part of your teaching strategy, you will want to discuss all of those outcomes with your learners.
Step 3: Deciding Who Will Plan the Portfolio
When deciding who will plan the portfolio, consider what’s involved in preparing gymnasts or skaters for a major tournament. The parent hires a coach. The coach, pupil, and parent plan together the routines, costumes, practice times, music, and so on. They are a team whose sole purpose is to produce the best performance possible. The gymnast or skater wants to be the best that he or she can be. He or she also wants to please parents and coaches and wants to meet their expectations. The atmosphere is charged with excitement, dedication, and commitment to genuine effort.
That is the atmosphere you are trying to create when using portfolios. You, the learner, and parents are a team for helping the student to improve writing, math reasoning, or scientific thinking and to assemble examples of this growing competence. Learners want to show what they can do and to verify the trust and confidence that you and their family have placed in them. The portfolio is their recital, their tournament, their competition. The principal stakeholders in the use of the portfolio are you, your learners, and their parents. Involve parents by sending home an explanation of portfolio assessment and, in addition, by asking that parents and students discuss its goals and content.
Step 4: Deciding Which Products to Put in the Portfolio and How Many Samples of Each Product
Two key decisions need to be considered: ownership and the portfolio’s link with instruction. Ownership refers to your learners’ perception that the portfolio contains what they want it to. You have considered this issue in Step 3. By involving learners and their parents in the planning process, you enhance their sense of ownership. You also do this by giving them a say in what goes into the portfolio. The task is to balance your desire to enhance ownership with your responsibility to see that the content of the portfolio measures the cognitive skills and dispositions that you identified in Step 3.
Both learners and their parents need to see that your class instruction focuses on teaching the skills necessary to fashion the portfolio’s content. You don’t want to require products in math, science, or social studies that you didn’t prepare learners to create. If it’s a writing portfolio, then your instructional goals must include teaching skills in writing poems, essays, editorials, or whatever your curriculum specifies. The same holds for science, math, geography, or history portfolios. In deciding what you would like to see included in your learners’ portfolios, you will have to ensure that you only require products that your learners were prepared to develop.
The best way to satisfy learner needs for ownership and your needs to measure what you teach is to require certain categories of products that match your instructional purposes and cognitive outcomes and to allow learners and parents to choose the samples within each category. For example, you may require that an eighth-grade math portfolio contains the following categories of math content (Lightfoot, 2006):
1. Number and operation, in which the learner demonstrates understanding of the relative magnitude of numbers, the effects of operations on numbers, and the ability to perform those mathematical operations.
2. Estimation, in which the learner demonstrates understanding of basic facts, place value, and operations; mental computation; tolerance of error; and flexible use of strategies.
3. Predictions, in which the learner demonstrates ability to make predictions based on experimental probabilities; to systematically organize and describe data; to make conjectures based on data analyses; and to construct and interpret graphs, charts, and tables.
Learners and their parents would have a choice of which assignments to include in each of the categories listed. For each sample, the learner includes a brief statement about what it says about his or her development of mathematical thinking skills.
Another example could be a high-school writing portfolio. The teacher requires that the following categories of writing be in the portfolio: persuasive editorial, persuasive essay, narrative story, autobiography, and dialog. Learners choose the samples of writing in each category. For each sample, they include a cover letter that explains why the sample was chosen and what it shows about the learner’s development as a writer.
You will also have to decide how many samples of each content category to include in the portfolio. For example, do you require two samples of persuasive writing, one of criticism, and three of dialogue? Shavelson, Gao, and Baxter (1991) suggest that at least eight products or tasks over different topic areas may be needed to obtain a reliable estimate of performance from portfolios.
Step 5: Building the Portfolio Rubrics
In Step 2, you identified the major cognitive skills and dispositions that your portfolio will measure. In Step 4, you specified the content categories that your portfolio will contain. Now you must decide what good, average, and poor performance look like for each entry in the portfolio and for the portfolio as a whole.
Step 6: Developing a Procedure to Aggregate All Portfolio Ratings
For each content category that you include in the portfolio, learners will receive a score for each draft and the final product. You will have to decide how to aggregate these scores into a final score or grade for each content area and, then, for the portfolio as a whole. Figures 10.2 and 10.4 are examples of a cumulative rating form in two content areas (essay and math) for one student. You will have one of these forms for each content area identified in Step 4. If you want a writing portfolio to include five areas of content (persuasive writing, dialogue, biography, criticism, and commentary), you will have five rating forms, each of which rates drafts and final product.
As you can see in Figures 10.2 and 10.4, the teacher averaged the ratings for the two preliminary drafts and the final one. The next step is to develop a rule or procedure for combining these three scores into an overall score. One procedure would be to compute a simple average of three scores. This method gives equal importance in the final score to the drafts and final product. Another procedure would be to assign greatest importance to the final product, lesser importance to the second draft, and least importance to the first draft. This is called weighting. If and how you weight scores is up to you. You might seek input from learners and parents, but there is no hard and fast rule about whether or which products in an area should be given more weight.
Step 7: Determining the Logistics
So far, you have accomplished these aspects of portfolio design:
1. Specified the purpose of the portfolio.
2. Identified the cognitive skills it will reflect.
3. Decided who will help plan it.
4. Decided what and how many products go in it.
5. Specified the rubrics by which to score it.
6. Developed a rating and grading scheme.
There are just a few details left.
Time Lines
Your learners and their parents need to know exact dates when things are due. Point this need out to your learners. This reinforces in your learners’ minds the link between your teaching and what’s required in the portfolio. Be prepared to revise some of your requirements. You may find that there’s not enough time in the school year and not enough hours in a week for you to read all the drafts and products and get them back to your learners in a timely manner.
How Products Are Turned in and Returned
Decide how, when, and where you want your learners to turn in their products. At the start of class? Placed in an “In” basket? Secured in a folder or binder? Returned in an “Out” basket? How will late assignments be handled? How do absent learners submit and get back assignments? Will there be penalties for late assignments?
Where Final Products Are Kept
Decide where the final products will be stored. Will it be the learners’ responsibility to keep them safely at home? Or do you want to store them so that they can be assembled easily for a final parent conference and passed on to other teachers? Remember that the products may include videotapes or audiotapes, so a manila folder might not work. You may need boxes, filing cabinets, or closets.
Who Has Access to the Portfolio?
Certainly you, learners, and parents have a right to see what’s in it. But do other students, current and future teachers, or administrators? You might want learners (and their parents) to help make those decisions.
Plan a Final Conference
Plan to have a final conference at the end of the year or term with individual learners and, if possible, their parents to discuss the portfolio and what it says about your learners’ development and final achievement. Your learners can be responsible for conducting the conference, with a little preparation from you on how to do it. This final event can be a highly motivating force for your learners to produce an exemplary portfolio.
The following checklist will help you as you design and revise your portfolio assessment program. Consider it carefully when planning your portfolio assignment.
