Portfolios
Portfolios are collections of students' work over time. A portfolio
often documents a student's best work and may include other types of process
information, such as drafts of the student's work, the student's self-assessment
of the work, and the parents' assessment. Portfolios may be used for evaluation
of a student's abilities and improvement.
In recent years, portfolios of students' performance and products have
gained impressive degrees of support from educators, who view them as a
way to collect authentic evidence of children's learning. For many early
childhood educators, portfolios are an attractive alternative to more traditional
assessment approaches. Often, however, teachers raise important questions
about what portfolios contain, what benefits they will bring to the classroom
and the children, and how they can be managed.
What do portfolios contain? Grosvenor (1993, pp. 14-15) lists
three basic models:
 | Showcase model, consisting of work samples chosen by the student. |
| Descriptive model, consisting of representative work of the student,
with no attempt at evaluation. |
| Evaluative model, consisting of representative products that have been
evaluated by criteria. |
DeFina (1992) lists the following assumptions about portfolio assessment:
| "Portfolios are systematic, purposeful, and meaningful collections
of students' works in one or more subject areas. |
| Students of any age or grade level can learn not only to select pieces
to be placed into their portfolios but can also learn to establish criteria
for their selections. |
| Portfolio collections may include input by teachers, parents, peers,
and school administrators. |
| In all cases, portfolios should reflect the actual day-to-day learning
activities of students. |
| Portfolios should be ongoing so that they show the students' efforts,
progress, and achievements over a period of time. |
| Portfolios may contain several compartments, or subfolders. |
| Selected works in portfolios may be in a variety of media and may be
multidimensional." (pp. 13-16) |
What benefits can they bring? Teachers who have experience with
portfolio assessment report that it complements such developmentally appropriate
curriculum and instruction as whole language, hands-on approaches, and
process mathematics. It also allows them to assess children's individual
learning styles, enhances their ability to communicate with parents about
children's learning, and helps to fulfill professional requirements of
school and community accountability (Polakowski, 1993). Implemented well,
portfolios can ensure that the focus and content of assessment are aligned
with important learning goals.
How can they be managed? The planning, collecting, storing, and
interpreting of authentic information on children's progress over time
is time consuming. Many teachers are initially hesitant or resistant to
use portfolio assessment because they fear that adding it to their existing
responsibilities may prove overwhelming.
Teachers who have made the transition from traditional assessment to
portfolio assessment advise that it requires a refocusing, not a redoubling
of teacher effort. Since the kinds of materials collected are typical classroom
tasks, assessment and instruction are joined together with curriculum.
Time spent in this kind of assessment, then, is not time taken away from
teaching and learning activities (Polakowski, 1993; Tierney, Carter, &
Desai, 1991).
Polakowski (1993, pp. 52-53) describes three management techniques she
uses concurrently for instruction and individualized assessment:
| Teacher-directed, timed centers through which small groups of students
rotate for equal amounts of time. |
| Child-directed, timed centers that children choose for the allotted
time. |
| Child-selected, timed centers that include some "must do"
tasks. |
Using such techniques, a teacher is able to engage in one-to-one assessment
conferences or instructional conversations and collect products for assessment
purposes.
What resources are available to help? The following are available
from the growing published resources in this field:
| Student Portfolios, from the National Education Association's Teacher-to-Teacher
Series, edited by Dalheim (1993). In this book, experienced teachers recount
their own experiences in studying, field testing, and fully implementing portfolio
assessment. Sample portfolio contents and forms are included. |
| Portfolio Assessment in the Reading Writing Classroom by Tierney,
Carter, and Desai (1991) is designed to help teachers think about how they
might employ portfolio assessment in literacy areas. It contains illustrations
of related materials and examples of student portfolios. |
| Portfolio Assessment: Getting Started by DeFina (1992) is a
practical oriented book offering suggestions for thinking through the concept
of portfolios, getting started, involving parents and students, and more.
|
| The Primary Program: Growing and Learning in the Heartland from the
Nebraska and Iowa Departments of Education (1993) has a lengthy appendix on
assessment, which includes suggestions for collecting, storing, and interpreting
authentic evidence through observation and children's products. |
For additional information, refer to The
Portfolio and Its Use: Developmentally Appropriate Assessment of Young
Children (Grace, 1992).
References
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