Rethinking Accountability: Response to "The ePortfolio Hijacked"

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Rethinking Accountability: Response to "The ePortfolio Hijacked"

1/23/2008

By Joe Shedd

This past December, Trent Batson voiced a concern in the C-Level View e-newsletter that others have raised in the past: that those in higher education who are responsible for meeting the demands of external accreditors have "hijacked" the idea of electronic portfolios, turning a learning tool that was once thought to be uniquely the property of its individual authors into a management tool designed and controlled to suit the institutional interests of higher education programs (see http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/56617/). Batson called on colleges and universities to make room for "multiple kinds of [systems], managed in different ways, and with different constituencies," allowing students to retain ownership of learning portfolios that represent their own work over time, while institutions employ "assessment management systems" to account for overall student learning to external audiences.

As the department chair who was responsible for helping design Syracuse University's student and program assessment system for its teacher preparation programs, as part of our effort to secure national accreditation from NCATE, I agree with much of Trent Batson's argument. The values of student creativity, self-expression, and personal ownership that have traditionally been identified with student portfolios have been compromised by many colleges' efforts to use electronic portfolios to document the performance of their students and programs for accreditation purposes. But, while I respect Batson’s argument, I take issue with his implication that ePortfolios and comprehensive assessment systems should have nothing to do with one another.

When we were developing our School of Education's ePortfolio system, one consultant told us that we "had" to specify exactly what artifacts students would include in their portfolios and "had" to require that the reflections students prepared on those artifacts address exactly the same principles, questions, or themes. Otherwise, he said, the portfolios could not be validly and reliably rated, for purposes of assessing individual students, cohorts of students, or overall programs. He also advised us that we "had" to require candidates to organize their portfolio artifacts and reflections around the outcome standards and sub-standards we had set for our programs, and "had" to develop detailed assessment rubrics specific to each.

The problem with this advice -- and why we ultimately rejected it -- was not simply that it would have done violence to the principle of student ownership that has traditionally been thought central to the concept of portfolios (although it surely would have done that). The problem was that it ran counter to the constructivist principles that were and are fundamental to our teacher preparation programs themselves, and to the way we had chosen to reflect those principles in our comprehensive assessment system. We had already decided that "Critical Reflection and Explanation of Practice" was to be one of the five basic proficiencies we would expect our candidates to develop over the course of their programs.