| Why Portfolios? |
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Portfolio
Contents Home The Background Guiding Questions Portfolios, Technologies, and the Composition Classroom EPortfolios Outlining Multimodal Composition The Cs Enhanced Writing Parallel Educational Tools First Parallel Second Parallel Third Parallel Fourth Parallel New Directions: Into Infinity (Expanding Ideas) Tangent Line 1 Tangent Line 2 Tangent Line 3 Final Reflections References |
| Question 1 |
Question 2 |
Although portfolios are sometimes used for standardized testing and placement or exit exams, I focus particularly on portfolio assessment in collegiate writing classrooms. In many of these classrooms, assessment—and grading—is determined according to a portfolio system. Students write all semester long; they write narrative, informative, argumentative, creative, and even poetic nonfiction texts. Students write for different audiences—professors, peers, web users, administrators, future employers—and in different mediums—hardcopy paper, memo, PowerPoint presentation, website, resume, and movie. In order to assess this multitude of text or document production, more than mere assignment grades are needed. Scaffolding and growth must be taken into account. The learning rather than a single particular end product becomes the primary focus of the course. Evaluating contextualized writing processes and products solves instructors’ problems of attempting to include participation, learning, growth, revision, and end products into final, point- or letter-system grades (Yancey, 1992; Blair & Takayoshi, 1997). By focusing on various steps associated with writing processes (prewriting, drafting, peer review, one-on-one conferencing, writing center conferences, more drafting, editing, proofreading), not only products, portfolio assessment focuses on students’ trajectory over the duration of the course, their points of departure from given formulas and archaic expectations. |
Not only are portfolios useful products for instructors, but portfolios also have the potential to be useful and meaningful to the students who compile them. According to Hawisher and Selfe (1997), portfolios “encourage students to reflect on their learning, thereby giving them an opportunity to enhance their performance through evaluative feedback and review” (p. 320). Portfolios, then, become an opportunity for growth. Portfolios typically emphasize what students learned throughout the course. What happened to their writing over the past 15 weeks? Were they able to transfer strategies from one project to the next? Do students’ portfolios demonstrate that course objectives were met? Students and instructors both benefit from asking these and similar questions. As Larson (1996) points out, answering these questions is an important move—portfolios, in effect, are “the written displays of the student’s learning process and of the teacher’s teaching process” (p. 272). Instructors highlight for themselves and their students the recursive nature of the writing process as they continuously strive to answer these questions (Gold, 1992). For writing assessment to be meaningful, assessment practices must be valid; there must be a well-constructed argument for the use of the assessment in a particular context for a particular purpose (Cronbach, 1988, Messick, 1989). Portfolios allow assessors to look within the particular context of the classroom and into the particular coursework of one student within that setting By answering the above questions, instructors have the opportunity to be reflexive practitioners with valid arguments. If aligned with the objectives, goals, and outcomes of the course, portfolios as an assessment practice can be effectively argued. The particular validity argument for use of a portfolio, though, cannot be made in this webtext. This text is not fitted to a particular context in which portfolios might be utilized; rather, it seeks to determine why portfolios and multimodal composition can be used in conjunction as learning devices and techniques for collegiate composition classrooms. |