Portfolio Assessment
What is Portfolio Assessment?
In portfolio assessment, rather than receiving a grade for each individual essay, students turn in a collection of essays and are assessed holistically on their entire portfolio. There are a variety of ways to set up portfolios: students can include all of their writing for the semester in a final portfolio, choose three or four of their best essays, compile a mid-semester and final portfolio, etc. Most portfolios, however, have these common features:
- Students submit rough
drafts as well as final drafts so instructors can assess students'
writing process as well as the final product.
- Students are given an
opportunity to revise portfolios throughout the semester, usually
after feedback from their peers and instructor.
- Students include a "process
memo" with their final portfolio. In the process memo students reflect
on their progress as writers and the rationale for specific revisions
they made to each essay.
- Instructors' assess the portfolios on the writing process as well as the final product, using a holistic assessment strategy rather than grading individual essays.
Advantages of Portfolio Assessment
There are a number of advantages to using portfolio assessment rather than grading each essay individually:
- Portfolio assessment
encourages revision.
- Portfolio assessment
encourages self-reflection.
- Portfolio assessment
encourages students to focus on feedback from readers (peers and the
instructor) rather than focus on grades.
- Portfolio assessment
provides more opportunities for students to take risks, since they
know they can continue to revise throughout the semester.
- Portfolios assess both
students' writing process and their final progress.
- Portfolios assess the students' work as a whole, rather than evaluating each piece of writing individually.
Portfolios and Instructor Workload
Portfolio assessment can be more time consuming than paper-by-paper assessment, but there are a number of techniques you can deploy to make portfolio assessment less of a workload:
- Stagger your response so
that students are turning in drafts for written feedback from you
throughout the semester. If you respond throughout the semester, you
won't need to give detailed response to the final portfolio.
- Use a response rubric to
evaluate the final portfolios or give short, holistic responses that
discuss two or three of the main strengths and weaknesses of the
portfolio.
- Use peer response to
provide feedback on drafts without increasing your workload as the
instructor.
- Rather than including every essay students have written over the course of the semester, have students choose 2-4 of their best essays and discuss why they chose those essays in the process memo.