Statement on Portfolio Assessment
The Learning Record Online (LRO) is a portfolio-based evaluation system that helps students think about their learning in ways that move beyond conventional grading methods and allow for more positive assumptions to gird the evaluation conversation.
It is composed of several parts. The first part includes two descriptions of the student’s history as a critical reader, writer, and thinker. The student asks someone who knows him/her well to write about him/her history. The student also writers his/her own history. At the mid-term and final they are required to assemble a selected body of work which demonstrates their development across the five dimensions of learning: 1) confidence and independence, 2) skills and strategies, 3) knowledge and understanding, 4) the use of prior and emerging experience, and 5) reflection and the four course-specific strands. These strands vary from course to course. In the literature course I taught, Women’s Popular Genres: Romance and Sentimentality, the strands included 1) genre, 2) critical interpretation, 3) written argument, and 4) technology. In Rhetoric and Composition 306, the required first-year writing class, the strands included 1) critical analysis 2) academic research skills 3) written argument, and 4) techonology. Throughout the course of the semester, the students are required to make weekly observations about the progress of their learning. To see a sample prompt for observations click here.
Students’ portfolios include “evidence” of their progress collected from a variety of sources. This system shifts the focus of evaluation back to the student who must share in the reflecting and evaluating process. It opens a dialogue where I can engage students individually about the specific areas and ways in which they are developing and progressing.
In my comments to the LRO and all written work students produce, I focus on what they are doing well first, and then gently call attention to areas that would benefit from improvement. I talk about writing as process-based and review the canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery as corresponding parts of that process. I have found that talking about writing in terms of drafts, “arguments waiting to happen,” and continued, significant revisions helps students do a better job of separating their identity as individuals from their performance on time-bound tasks. I encourage them to push their thinking into nuanced, sophisticated arguments and discuss writing strategies for inventing and tightening thesis statements, building transitions between ideas at the sentence and paragraph level, developing a critical framework for quote inclusion, as well as other issues as they surface. If asked, they would tell you my favorite question is “so what?” Both in class and in my comments, I ask them to imagine their audience whining, “so what, who cares, why should I listen to you” in an attempt to get them to establish their argument’s exigence and importance.
I have used both portfolio and non-portfolio-based evaluation in my courses. Overall, I have really appreciated and learned from the insights that portfolio-based assesment has allowed. As an instructor, it has enabled me to clearly articulate and share my goals for the course with students in the form of the course strands. Additionally, it has facilitated a sense of shared responsibility in the learning endeavor and allowed students to develop both their abilities and their confidence.
Since they make observations about their learning process and progress twice a week, I was able to help students on an individual basis, even if they had not come to see me in office hours. I found that this one-on-one dialogue that the LRO opened up, seemed to enable students to become more comfortable asking questions in class. Also, I was able to get insights into how the class was going from their perspective. My experience using this system with both sophomore-level literature students and first-year composition students suggests that it works best with students who are further along in their college careers. In the future, I will continue to use elements of the portfolio approach, although depending on the class goals and students’ needs, I may not use the entire portfolio system. The parts I have found most helpful as an instructor include the interviews and the student observations.