Portfolio

Portfolio

            A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student’s effort, progress and achievements in one or more areas of the curriculum. The collection must include the following:

1.    Student participation in the selection of contents;

2.    Criteria for selection;

3.    Criteria for judging merits; and

4.    Evidence of a student’s self-reflection.

Portfolios should represent a collection of student’s best work or best effort, students-selected samples of work experiences related to outcomes being assessed, and documents showing the growth and development of mastering identified outcomes (Paulson & Meyer, 1991).

      Portfolios, in classrooms today, are derived from the visual and performing arts tradition in which they serve to showcase artists’ accomplishments and personally favored works. It may be a folder containing a students’ evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of his/her works. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay involving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision.

Purpose of Using a Portfolio

      Portfolios can enhance the assessment process by revealing a range of skills and understanding of students; supporting instructional goals; reflecting change and growth over a period of time; encouraging student, teacher, and parent reflection; and providing for continuity in education from one year to the next. Instructors can use portfolios for specific purposes including;

1.    Encouraging self-directed learning;

2.    Giving a comprehensive view of what has been learned;

3.    Fostering learning about learning;

4.    Demonstrating progress toward identified outcomes;

5.    Creating an intersection for instruction and assessment;

6.    Providing a way for students to value themselves as learners; and

7.    Offering opportunities for peer-supported growth.

Recent changes in education policies, which emphasize greater teacher involvement in designing curriculum and assessing students, have been an impetus to increase portfolio use. Portfolios are valued as an assessment tool because, as representations of classroom-based performance, they can be fully integrated into the curriculum, and in like separate tests, they supplement rather than take time away from instruction. Moreover, many teachers, educators, and researchers believed that portfolio assessments are more effective than “old style” tests for measuring academic skills and informing instructional decisions.

Characteristics of an Effective Portfolio

            According to George (1995), portfolio assessment is a multi-faceted process characterized by the following recurrent qualities.

1.    It is a continuous and ongoing, providing both  formative (ongoing) and summative (culminating) opportunities for monitoring student’s progress toward achieving essential outcomes

2.    It is multidimensional as it reflects a wide variety of artifacts and processes various aspects of the students’ learning.

3.    It provides for collaborative reflection, including ways for students to think about their own thinking processes and met cognitive introspection as they monitor their own, reflect upon their problem solving and decision-making approaches and observe their emerging understanding of the subjects and skills.

Although approaches to portfolio development may vary, all the major researches and literature on the portfolios reinforce the following characteristics:

1.    They clearly reflect stated learner outcomes identified in the core or essential curriculum that the students are expected to study.

2.    They focus the students’ performance-based learning experiences, as well as their acquisition of the key knowledge, skills and attitudes.

3.    They contain samples of work that stretch over an entire marking period, rather than single points in time.