Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of Portfolio

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Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of Portfolio

9/18/2006

Still, ePortfolio technology is not without its trials. For starters, particularly at small schools, it can be tough to find the time and resources to make the projects and technologies work. At larger institutions, the issue may be cultural: The greater the number of faculty, the more daunting the task of convincing educators to surrender age-old assessment techniques for something new. Finally, there is the essential need for schools to conduct ongoing self-assessment of the newer assessment approach.

Neal Topp, director of the Center for ePortfolio-Based Assessment at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, says that in order for ePortfolio efforts to succeed, schools must document the impact of the technology on students, faculty, and the institution alike. “As higher ed institutions adapt to society’s current and future needs and expectations, implementing robust ePortfolios will increase effectiveness and document our value to our students and communities,” he maintains.

Then and Now

In order to understand all that an ePortfolio can be, it’s important to look briefly at what the electronic tool was originally intended to be: a collection of electronic documents that demonstrate the owner’s skills, education, and knowledge to a target reader. In academia, instructors use ePortfolios to evaluate student competency in a particular subject. Today, most ePortfolio efforts fall into three main categories: developmental, reflective, and representational. While a developmental ePortfolio comprises a record of assignments over time, a reflective ePortfolio includes personal reflection on the content as well. A representational ePortfolio shows achievements in relation to particular work or developmental goals and is, therefore, selective. Importantly, these three main ePortfolio flavors may be mixed to achieve different learning, personal, or work-related outcomes. Across academia, at least according to Mark Schlesinger, associate VP for academic technology at the University of Massachusetts system, schools do just that.

“Technological approaches like ePortfolios offer better ways to collaborate on such things as development of standards and criteria, as well as measurement,” says Schlesinger, whose statewide network of schools has already implemented a few ePortfolio programs, and received nearly $200,000 in state and federal grants to develop a comprehensive electronic portfolio program over the next few years. “I see ePortfolios as a way to accumulate information that is instrumental for the student, the individual faculty member, the department chair, the dean, and so on, up the ladder.”

Like the UMass schools, many colleges and universities have adopted ePortfolios gradually. Instead of embracing the tools campuswide, these institutions have rolled them out in a handful of departments first. This was the strategy at Iowa State University, where more than 1,000 students in a number of different departments now use the technology. At Iowa State, the ePortfolio system (“eDoc”) is an outgrowth of JA-SIG’s