The Latin words for 'carry' (port) and 'leaf' (folio) combine to mean "a flat, portable case.....for carrying loose sheets of paper, manuscripts, drawings, etc." or a list of an investor's holdings, according to Webster's second. The sense of a finite, significant representation of a larger whole, housed together, holds in current educationese. This sample selection of a student's work can reflect progress, portray best or important content or process, or some other judicious gathering of student effort. It can cover an area of study, a skill, a process, or time periods. It can portray an integrated profile of a student. (One controversial use of portfolios is the certification or re-certification of teachers.) A portfolio can be contained within a disk, a video or audio tape, a 3-ring binder, a folder. Its contents can be chosen by a teacher or a teacher team, a student, a student group. Ownership varies: some portfolios are designed for current teacher use and then move to the student's next instructor, others belong to the student.
What Are the Strengths of Portfolios?
* Longitudinally, they can unearth patterns of success, failure, gaps, preferences, styles. They make it possible to trace development over time and to ascertain work habits. In these ways they spotlight the student more than the work. The result will not be a statement, but a series of voices, a profile of the student as an invididual. The educator also recedes as the student looms larger, especially if a combination of teachers is involved.
* Portfolios can accommodate a variety of learning styles.
* Portfolios can show process when they include incremental components of a project indicating a student's ability to critically select and use information. Over time, they can show the evolution of this ability.
* Educators can use portfolios to check or establish individual expectations based on past endeavors. The student can compare himself with himself. Competition is diminished, and personal goals are enhanced.
* Students can practise being 'in charge.' The freedom of self-selection is balanced by the responsibility of thoughtful justification, and the in-charge is self-directed. Portfolios and their assessment can be a major component of turning learning over to learners.
* Portfolios can record reflection and revision, as well as allow for them. These are hard processes to develop. A student should be able to choose and revise a project (even if it has been graded) upon reflection and feedback. Also, if a portfolio, with a clear assessment understanding, is due at the end of a marking period, and the teacher and librarian offer themselves as allies, many students will seek critical feedback on a project and work toward improved portfolios and better grades. This is a plus for educators who have provided many opportunities for students to benefit from their assistance; their expectations can be higher during the final assessment. The fairness is obvious. (The first time this is offered, students may ignore the offer or wait until the last day to try to improve a project, lacking experience of how their initiative and assistance from educators can improve their grades. Modeling the improvement and assistance process and repeating the assessment criteria and rubrics during the grading period are two ways to encourage revision. Going over a project after the marking period with a student, a group, or a class, pointing out opportunities for revision and educator guidance, and the positive impact on a grade, is a third way. The next marking period should include a similar option.)
* Portfolios can be a touchstone for grades; verifying, describing, explaining. For instance, they can indicate the difficulty of a task as well as the quality of response. When accompanying student reports, they often include rubrics, teacher commentaries, and perhaps a folder or pamphlet of standard samples.
* They can provide a good foundation for conferencing with students and/or family. When included in a family conference, a student is likely to point out an example from his portfolio to help a parent understand a concept.
* Planning can be a natural outcome of a portfolio. Together or singly, teacher and learner have a concrete starting place replete with clues.
* Students must distance themselves from their works to be able to judge them. They try to see their portfolios as others might see them. In this way they get a more rounded image of themselves and their development.
* Librarians and classroom teachers can create 'anthology' portfolios to demonstrate their own accountability.
A portfolio is not an assessment tool of itself, and has been accused of being nothing more than another folder for student work. Further, that it can be constituted to reflect a false image. To counteract undue subjectivity and careless quality, it is critical that portfolios are assembled to be compatible with a valid, written assessment tool. Such a tool requires that a portfolio contains material that is significant, that depicts a chosen performance, that can be measured with specific criteria. It must also pertain to important obectives. The following information literacy skills lend themselves to collection, selection, and assessment within portfolios, and were selected from a list by Daniel Callison in "The Potential for Portfolio Assessment," School Library Media Annual, 1993:
- pose worthwhile questions
- evaluate the adequacey of an argument
- deal with quandaries...that have no unique solutions
- agree or disagree in degrees
- extend a line of thought beyond...first impressions
[When students arbitrarily choose material for a portfolio, and then write a cover letter, they are putting into words the criteria they used for their choices. The letter becomes a statement of claims with written support describing specific evidence. This cover letter could then become the focus of a conference or a teacher's aid in evaluating the portfolio. Not only is the content there to measure, but the student's justification. Does the student understand her own work, or the direction in which she is going? Do the selections accurately reflect the student's intent? Students may also choose material on the basis of jointly planned objectives or a teacher's set of objectives with criteria. The cover letter then becomes a justification of choices relating to that written set of criteria. The selection can only be as significant as the criteria is significant. Also, if the cover letter is merely a summary of contents, it has not served its function - to be an explicit guide to distinct objectives. In other words, a perceptive self-assessment. ]
Districts and states are attempting, with debated results, to incorporate portolio assessment within major school reform efforts. These are used to measure school-wide, district-wide, and statewide performance in relation to curriculum frameworks. (North Dakota has a library media section in their framework.) If staff response to school reform is superficial, portfolios will be too, and will be unable to fulfill their promise. If training and commitment to the reforms and portfolio use are poor, the results have been failure on both counts. Vermont has placed a great deal of importance on an assessment system that supported 'good teaching,' defined as teaching that supports thinking and problem-solving. Vermont has also added the use of portfolio assessment to the use of standardized tests. To give portfolio use a good chance, the above considerations are important.
Librarians and Portfolios
School librarians constantly collect data over time, assess it, and use the results as documentation for collection development and curriculum design. It is a small bridge to using portfolios (collected, selected material of student research efforts) to document performance of information skills.
Partnering with Portfolios
Information skills are naturally embedded within other subject areas. Classroom teachers often include some aspect of the process within a project. The librarian may be able to augment and upgrade such plans as well as provide point-of-need help and formative suggestions. Keyword concepts may require more work with synonyms or associative brainstorming. Or students may be ripe for boolean searching. Also, newer standards and curriculum outlines contain more and more lifelong learning skills; teachers may welcome a partner to share the implementation.
When portfolios are the favored vehicles of assessment, librarians have an opportunity and a challenge to piggyback as they plan in partnership. The bottom of the opened portfolio could be folded up, providing a 'pocket' on either side. One side could be for information skill selections. Choices that overlap with subject selections could be photocopied. A checklist of choices or a set of criteria could top the collection, together with a cover letter. This checklist, originally clipped to the back page of a student's working folder, is a vertically divided sheet. Tasks or learner skills are added periodically on left, and space on right used for comments, dates of work or conclusion. The sheet serves as a clear reminder for possible portfolio content, skills to be mastered, and a tickler for time elements as well as a headway tracker.
Originally, portfolios were product-oriented. They have become more and more process-oriented, including a student's project plans and sequential drafts. With the growing use of student-chosen resource materials instead of texts, together with theme-based curricula, activities and products have become information-rich. Searching skills can be more frequently applied. Instead of a grade-level requirement to "learn note-taking" or one giant research paper a year, the student will acquire needed content and practise topical problem-solving.
Mini-Portfolios
The foregoing paragraph makes the case for mini-portfolios for each research project. No selection takes place - the holdings include such research strategies as brainstorms or concept webs, key-word developments, source exploration plans, double entry journals, student-designed project timelines, prep sheets for conferences. Highlighted computer printouts that students used as source material may be required. Marked printouts alert assessors to comprehension or selection problems. They can also forestall flip use of cut-and paste, and provide a step toward helping students learn how to use cut-and-paste wisely. The educator presents selected skills that will be assessed, along with explained assessment tools, as the project begins. This write-up is stapled to the mini-portfolio. The last student inclusions are a written analysis of specific research strategies used in the assignment and comments on new learning in these areas, relating them to the assessment tool.
From Volume IV of A Maine Sampler of Information Skills Activities:
"....instead of doing a 'report on the Pilgrims at Plymouth,' the assignment might be: 'What if the Pilgrims landed in Florida? or Maine? or Greenland? or Puerto Rico?' With the former, the librarian might expect to review access and location skills and the 900s. However with the latter, the librarian would be assisting with students as they make comparisons and draw conclusions. Students, instead of merely reporting, would be applying their location and selection skills more than once in short succession."
And their research process would contain thinking skills from a broad range of Blooms' Taxonomy, not confined to lower-level ones by the Plymouth report. The problem-solving would not be routine - just the kind found in reality. And the choice of skills to assess would be very broad. The objectives chosen could relate to key words and phrases and use of indexes, or use of graphics such as comparison charts, or some other objective suiting the needs of the students and suited to the project. Further application of the research; have students then 'tell the story,' this is transforming the information from one format to another, in this case into a fictional yet factually correct format. The student who comprehends what has been researched will be able to transfer easily. The student who has gone through the motions or who has been able to hide confusion now faces a need to correct that situation. The student who daydreams scenarios will use this style with flair. The creation of an unusual simulation by applying researched information will also bring a satisfying sense of closure to the activities.
Portfolios and Plagiarism
RX for plagiarism. When an assignment includes a 'process' portfolio, the librarian can collect this portfolio and 'source check' at the point of the first full draft. [The portfolio should include footnotes and bibliography at this point, as well as printouts and web addresses.] When students know this ahead of time, a source check is a strong plagiarism preventive. It's also an opportunity to provide or offer "honesty" training in paraphrasing and footnoting. When it occurs before an assignment is concluded, repairs can be made as a learning experience; the librarian is a helper, not a punisher. A large number of students do not fully understand plagiarism or its seriousness. This is an opportunity to correct erroneous assumptions as students 'do' various kinds of excerpting.
Multimedia Portfolios
Videotapes, audiotapes, and photographs have been included in portfolios for some years now. A video can comprise an entire portfolio. Videos can be end products of a research project. A New York High School videotaped student presentations of their constructed motorized devices, using scoring criteria to assess communication and presentation skills as well as thinking skills. Portfolios can include primary sources created by students, such as interviews or filmed data. Selections from these primary sources can be used to assess information skills such as questioning. A videotape can be a longitudinal repository for developmental evidence, or house unwieldy or temporal data; informative posters, for instance, or a how-to demonstration, peer teaching, or views of a model. In-process research activities can be valuable on tape: a video'd fishbowl presentation can be used to verify a teacher's scoring or to introduce students to the process or to practice scoring techniques [see OBSERVATION chapter], or as a component of a librarian's portfolio.
Computer disks and CDROMS have even more capacity and versatility as repositories of or vehicles for information literacy examples. As portfolios they are all-embracing, availing contributors to display all media, including text, and to reflect a multiplicity of learning styles. Computer applications can also provide research products. Excerpts in paper or electronic form can be valid portions of a student portfolio.
Pilot projects involving electronic portfolios and their assessment abound. Many of them maintain web pages that provide up-to-date information about their progress. A selected set of descriptions and URLs may be found at the end of this chapter.
WARNING: Educators are fostering and assessing more and more student qualities related to workplace behavior. Some examples: initiative, teamwork, sense of responsibility, quality producer, persistence, open-mindedness. (see STANDARDS chapter) When such assessments are recorded electronically in individual or group portfolios, the question of privacy arises. This concern is further addressed via the following web page:
REWARD: Confidentiality can contribute to a positive assessment climate as well: some portfolio components such as student group evaluations, self-observations, and some kinds of journal entries benefit from a commitment to "for Librarian's eyes only."
Setting the Stage
In conjunction with classroom teachers, immerse students in research activities of many kinds. This requires extensive time blocks. [I often research with half a class for a two-period stretch while teachers conduct mini-lessons crafted especially for the other half.] These activities must include significant yet curriculum-appropriate choices by students. Students must feel that their ideas count.
First Steps
1. Create your own portfolio. Team with a student teacher or a classroom teacher to jointly do a sample mini-research portfolio. Have library workers - students or adult volunteers - develop mini-research portfolios.
2. Collect portfolio samples from colleague's classes.
3. Select a small group to begin with. Introduce the concept of mini-research portfolios or a pocket in a subject portfolio devoted to research components. Share your portfolio collection. [Important when you are beginning and don't have samples from past classes.] Translate the quantity or raw material part of your portfolio into student requirements...including a time frame. For instance: 1+ page double-entry journal page(s) to 3 sources each week, records and 1 sentence reaction to 6 other sources a week. Or, 3 webs a week of brainstormed topics (topics approved by teacher) and written presearch overview of one, culminating in a focus statement. This will insure that students will have a range of work from which to select.
At end of time frame, have students arrange their efforts from most effective to least effective. Give them a prompt sheet to help them write an assessment of their work. For example: What makes this your best (research, web, bibliography, plan, focus statement)? What problems did you encounter in the process? How did you resolve them? What is the biggest difference between your top priority work and your lowest? Add a future goals question, perhaps relating to a specific, new project.
4. Carry on! You now have a positive, (the top priority choice) best effort piece, complete with specific, named strengths, for each student. You also have a discussion of strategies, and a needs projection showing you the perceptions these students have about what they can do and where they need help. For starters, use the results for conferencing, profiling students' problem-solving strengths and requirements, planning, as models for future classes. The more activities you do of this nature, the more individual and group information use patterns you will note.
"Portfolio evaluation could be called a test that's good to teach to."
New Directions in Portfolio Assessment,
Ed. L. Black, D. Daiker, J. Sommers, G. Stygall. Heinemann, 1994. p. 44
SAMPLE ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIOS ON THE NET
August 1997
Maine Educational Media Associaton
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