Portfolio Assessment

(Scroll to the end for a glossary of terms)

Portfolio assessment is a collection of your child's work in a class that he and his teacher have selected to reflect his/her growth over a period of time. Portfolios are a purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student's efforts, progress and achievements in one or more areas. The collection must include student participation in selecting the contents, the criteria for selection, the criteria for judging merit and evidence of student self-reflection.

Links:

Roger Farr's Web Page: http://www.indiana.edu/~crls/rfarr

Dr. Roger Farr is a professor of education at Indiana University. He has written about and speaks often on assessment issues. His website contains lots of material on portfolios. If you have a chance to hear him speak at a conference, go early! It's quite a treat to hear him and you'll come away with a lot of very practical information for working with students.

Student Portfolios: http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/admuses

Administrative Uses What are student portolios? How are portfolios used for instruction? How are porfolios used for administrative purposes? These are just a few of the many questions addressed in this informative Education Consumer Guide. Produced by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Research, this article provides pointers for portfolio usuage, a national list individuals working in the area of portfolios, and a directory of personal contacts at several state departments of education. To get directory of state departments of education click here. For Washington contact call Ed Roeber, Council of Chief State School Officers at (202) 336-7045 or write: 1 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Suite 700 Washington, DC 20001-1431

Portfolio Assessment of Your Work - A Guide: http://www.kckps.k12.ks.us/course/portfol

These are some characteristics of portfolios, a proposed scoring rubric for portfolios, and some thoughts which may help you as you plan, design and construct a portfolio of your work. Please note that not all of the characteristics or ideas below have to be in everyone's portfolio. All portfolios will be different and unique to each person. The ideas below should guide and assist you in this process.

Innovative Assessment of Electronic and Information literacy

http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~orono/collaborative/spring/contents

Maine Educational Media Association Information Skills Committee

first steps: short, simple activities to familiarize educators and students with alternative assessment options to evaluate information literacy and electronic literacy.

What if teachers, parents and students could have immediate access to many examples of student work throughout that student's school years?
. . . not just paper and pencil work
. . . including performance assessments
. . . including audio and video samples (multimedia)

Ten options for portfolio development:

http://transition.alaska.edu/www/Portfolios/ElectronicPortfolio

PROJECT purposes and uses, COLLECT and organize, SELECT valued artifacts, INTERJECT personality, REFLECT metacognitively, INSPECT and self-assess goals, PERFECT, evaluate, and grade (if you must), CONNECT and conference, INJECT AND EJECT to update, RESPECT accomplishments and show pride.

Glossary of Terms:

Alternative Assessment

The utilization of non-traditional approaches in judging student performance.
Assessment: The act or result of judging the worth or value of something or someone.
Authentic Assessment: The multidimensional process of judging students' acceptable performance behaviors in life-like role applications.
Culminating Outcome: An ultimate synthesis and application of prior learning in significant performance contexts.
Descriptor: A set of signs for determining the student's level of achievement in a performance or product.
Exhibition: An authentic assessment activity by which students demonstrate or perform what they have learned. An exhibition might be a project, an essay, an oral or written report or performance, a portfolio, or piece of artwork. Effective exhibitions define essential learning and focus the curriculum, teacher and students.
Goal: Achievement toward which effort is directed. Concerned with ultimate outcomes and usually phrased in general or global terms.
Holistic Scoring: Score based on an over-all impression as opposed to conventional test scoring which counts up performance on parts to make a total score.
Model: A standard or example for imitation or comparison.
Needs Assessment: The process by which one identifies needs and decides upon priorities among them. A need may be defined as a condition in which there is a discrepancy between and acceptable state of affairs and an observed state of affairs.
Objective: Statement of short-term behavior that taken together with goals are thought to contribute to the envisioned final goal.
Open-Ended Thinking: When one is presented with a problem or question with eight no "right" answer or the best answers can be obtained by an almost infinite variety of solution paths. Typical writing prompts are open-ended; by contrast, multiple-choice tests are not open-ended.
Outcome: Culminating demonstration of learning that really matters.
Performance Assessment: To "act upon and bring to completion." Involves displaying one's knowledge effectively to bring to fruition a complex product or event. Performance assessments typically involve the creation of products.
Portfolios: A purposeful collection of student work that exhibits the student's efforts, progress and achievements in one or more areas. The collection must include student participation in selecting the contents, the criteria for selection, the criteria for judging merit and evidence of student self-reflection.
Process: Refers to intermediate steps students take to reach the final performance or end-product. It thus includes all strategies, decisions, rough drafts and rehearsals - whether deliberate or not - used to complete the task.
Product: The tangible and stable result of a performance or task. An artifact from which we can infer a good deal about both a student's ability to perform and the processes that led to the product.
Rubrics: The quality criteria and standards by which a product, performance or outcome demonstration of significance will be developed and/or assessed.