WPA Assessment Institute
Electronic Portfolios, Writing Classrooms, and College Programs:
Emerging Practices and Theories, New Issues and Challenges
Margaret Price, Darren Cambridge, Michael Neal
July 12, 2007
Definitions, Core Concepts,
and Key Contexts
What are some foundational features or
characteristics of portfolios?
While portfolios are more, they should at
least include:



Collection
Selection
Reflection
What do we often associate with
Collection?



Rationale: written competencies are complex enough that
rarely can a single piece of writing demonstrate the
necessary range
Challenges: students need to keep and organize relevant
writing samples from first year courses; some writing
samples must be completed outside of classes
Rewards: if done well, students will have initial
longitudinal evidence of their learning and development
for their own benefit and for others
What do we often associate with
Selection?



Rationale: students consciously choose texts (or
other artifacts) from a larger body of work to
demonstrate competence
Challenges: many students don’t have the larger
picture of educational goals or understand how
to appropriately represent themselves to the
reader
Rewards: students who learn to select their best
samples and an appropriate range of material
know the outcomes or goals
What do we often associate with
Reflection?



Rationale: students who reflect on their work
and processes have greater opportunities for
self assessment, goal setting, and other valuable
objectives
Challenges: many portfolio models don’t
include reflection; students must be guided to
effective reflection; reflection genres vary
Rewards: students who learn effective reflection
techniques ideally internalize them and become
life-long learners; assessors can use reflection to
gain insights on student work
Principles of Reflection





Tacit knowledge (Dewey)
Reflection-on-action, reflection-in-action
(Schön)
Reflective practitioner (Hillocks)
Reflection-in-action, constructive reflection,
reflection-in-presentation (Yancey)
Stages of reflection: description, analysis,
judgment, planning (Kolb)
Challenges in Reflection




It can serve many different functions from goal
setting to self assessment to surveillance
It can appeal in portfolios in a number of places
and genre: cover letter, reflective essay,
reflective annotations, end notes, etc.
Students need to be taught and guided through
the processes
Difficult to know how to include in the
assessment
Potential Shift in Core Contexts for
Writing Specialists


Early portfolios (’80s-’90 portfolio heyday)
seemed to emphasize process and the ability to
comment on works in process (e.g., Eva)
Reemergence of ePortfolios seem to emphasize
advantages of the range of digital texts included
in portfolios such as visual rhetoric, multimedia composition, multiple genres, and
diversity in artifacts (e.g., Clarissa)
Key Concepts






Multiple and connected
Integrity
Emergent outcomes
Audience
Subject Position
Multimodality
Tensions in Portfolio Use
Purpose
Accountability Improvement
Epistemology
Objectivist
Intuitionist
Locus of
Control
Metaphor
Institutional
Individual
Test
Story
Framework
Outcomes
Abilities
Rubric
Criteria
Heuristics
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
•
Using portfolios designed to promote learning for high
stakes assessment poses numerous legal and
psychometric problems (Wilkerson & Lang 2003)
•
Portfolio formats and workflows designed for large scale
assessment rarely promote learning directly
•
Learning and motivation tied to individual ownership
and audience
Core Concept: Multiple …
•
Working portfolio - all the material collected or made
available for use in portfolios and all the associations made
within that collection; the larger archive from which portfolio
elements are selected
•
Presentation portfolio - designed for and shared with
particular audiences or collection of audiences for a particular
rhetorical purpose
•
Remixing - Power of time, energy, and information invested
can be multiplied
Core Concept: … & Connected
•
Discourse around shared ePortfolios
can build community
•
Portfolios can integrate multiple
sources of evidence, including other
portfolios
•
Multiple technologies can be integrated
to support ePortfolio development and
use
Multiple and (Somewhat) Connected
at New Century College





First-year portfolio
Course portfolio
Leadership portfolio
Internship portfolio
Graduation portfolio
Core Concept: Integrity




Integration of the personal, professional,
and academic
Portfolio as a site for investigating conflict
and achieving synthesis
“Professionally tuned personal”
“most accurately and positively reflect
your human being”
Importance of Integrity



An elements of integrative learning (more later)
eFolio Minnesota research indicates a central
factor in degree of impact and motivation
Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio
Research results show impact on motivation,
retention, student engagement

LaGuardia & Kapi’olani Community Colleges
Tracy Wright on Integrity
I think it'd be difficult to separate completely, you know, who I am
and what my immediate family loves are versus just me as a
professional educator and nurse. So I think that that was
important for me to be able to display that … I am a real person: I
have a family, I have kids and I think that that brings me closer to
what maybe students are experiencing. I am not someone who's
isolated to the world of professional nursing education. I also have
conflicting, or competing maybe, obligations within my life that I
need to balance, just as students do and other professionals do,
and I think that that's a good thing, to show students and people
that are reading my sites, I have other obligations in my life, and I
manage to hopefully balance them all and be able to perform to the
best of my ability in all those domains.
Examples of Integrity



Tracy Wright
Manju Poudel
Sean Moore
Core Concept: Emergent Outcomes





Important to measure intended learning
outcomes, but
Learning in complex and people are diverse
Some of the most important learning may be
that we couldn’t predict was going to happen
Yancey: the “experienced curriculum” vs. the
“delivered curriculum”
Portfolios as a genre solicit evidence of
emergent outcomes
Academics as Test of Self in Leadership
Portfolios


We intended for curricular content to be an central
source of evidence and ideas and strategies, but it
didn’t show up this way
Class work functioned as



A demonstration of character virtues
An experience
A goal putting aspiration towards those virtues in action
Steadfastness

Consistency of commitment over time seen as a
central leadership virtue





Tenacity, perseverance, patience, follow through
Standing up to opposition and peer pressure
Essential to ability to create change
Much more prominent than persuasiveness
Spirituality and family key arenas for demonstrating
steadfastness
Core concept: Audience



Explicitly define audience for
portfolio authors, and/or clarify to
what extent they should self-define
their audiences.
Audience of faculty portfolio jury:
Sarat Muhammed.
Audience of first-year biology
students: Bethany Strong.
Core concept: Subject position



The chosen tool / platform will have a
significant impact on how portfolio
authors position themselves.
The politics of the interface are relevant
here, as is Lisa Nakamura’s research on
the ways that interfaces tend to police
authors’ abilities to position themselves.
Example: Alice Woods.
Core concept: Multimodality






To what ends do we want to encourage
multimodality?
How do multimodality and access overlap? To
what extent are the conversations within
disability studies and studies of usability “talking
to” each other?
What does “meaningful” multimodality look like?
Example: Roxanne Samuels.
Example: Quellencia Hall.
Example: Latrice Darnell.
Key Contexts


Student affairs - academic affairs
partnerships
First-year experience
Key Context: Student Affairs and
Academic Affairs Partnerships


Focus of third cohort of the
Inter/National Coaltion for Electronic
Portfolio Research
Shifts focus to the whole of students
learning during their learning careers and
the full range of ways colleges and
universities support that learning
Key context: First-year experience

Opportunity to integrate




Across disciplines
Between home and campus cultures
Context for academic and personal planning
Conversation piece for building relationships
with faculty