Warren Sandmann, College of Arts and Humanities
Portfolios are a collection of student material that can be used to assess student learning and/or program effectiveness. Portfolio assignments should be related to the overall goals and/or objectives of an academic program. Portfolios generally contain a variety of samples of student work collected over the course of the student’s educational career at an institution or in an academic program. The examples of student work are both direct indicators of student achievement as well as "proof" that the student has met the goals of the program. Student material that is collected in a portfolio varies by academic area. Some common examples of student material include writing samples, scores on standardized discipline-specific tests or assessment measures, research projects, internship papers, reflection papers, and projects that demonstrate skills specific to that discipline. Portfolios are often used in conjunction with capstone courses, allowing academic programs to embed the assessment process in a program requirement. Assessment of the portfolio itself is usually based on meeting specific content and quality requirements for the portfolio. Portfolios can either be traditional (physical collections of material gathered in a binder or some other device) or electronic (generally web-based).
Academic Richness: Portfolios allow for both a broad view of a student’s skills and attitudes and specific insights into a student’s performance.
Personal Contact: Each student creates her or his own portfolio, which is assessed and commented upon individually.
Demonstrated achievement: Collecting samples of student work offers proof that a student has acquired enough knowledge to produce evidence of that knowledge.
Direct indicator: Samples of actual student work are (or should be) direct indicators that a student has (or has not) met the goals and/or objectives of a program.
Student Involvement: Programs that allow students (within limits) to select materials that will be in the portfolio, and/or require students to maintain and update the portfolios, increase student involvement in their own education.
Career Benefits: Portfolios can be used by students as demonstrations of their abilities as the students apply for jobs or graduate study.
Construction and maintenance: Regardless of the type (traditional or electronic), someone has to either teach students how to create and maintain portfolios, or help to create and maintain portfolios for the students.
Selection of materials: The academic program needs to be able to agree on what the goals of the program are and on what material should be a part of the portfolio to demonstrate achievement of those goals.
Evaluation: Faculty must decide how portfolios will be evaluated, where the evaluation will take place in the program, what part this evaluation will play a student’s overall progress in the program, and who will do the evaluation.
Lack of structure: There needs to be a place in the academic program for a portfolio, either as part of a course or as a graduation requirement. Programs that lack either of these would need to create a place for the portfolio.
Departmental buy-in: To ensure that student work represents the program, a variety of courses and all faculty must be a part of the process of determining what will go in the portfolio. Faculty may have to alter or add assignments to courses, and will have to indicate which assignments are suitable for portfolio inclusion.
If using a sample, rather than the entire student population of a program, programs must ensure that the sample is representative.
Match the goals and objectives of the program with the samples collected in the portfolio.
Provide students with both direction (categories or suggestions of student work) and freedom (students choose from suggested categories) in the selection of portfolio material.
Ensure that there is a large pool of assignments from which students can select of those that go in the portfolio to meet program goals.
Indicate to students in course syllabi which assignments could be appropriate for portfolio inclusion.
Use portfolios in conjunction with a capstone course or experience.
Use portfolios to measure student achievement and departmental achievement.
Make portfolio material available to an audience outside of the program (with student consent)
Use the evaluation of the portfolio as a guide to any curricular changes or modifications to the program.
