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)Eva  Reemergence of ePortfolios seem to emphasize advantages of the range of digital texts included in portfolios such as visual rhetoric, multi- media composition, multiple genres, and diversity in artifacts (e.g., Clarissa)Clarissa

Key Concepts  Multiple and connected  Integrity  Emergent outcomes  Audience  Subject Position  Multimodality

Tensions in Portfolio Use PurposeAccountabilityImprovement EpistemologyObjectivistIntuitionist Locus of Control InstitutionalIndividual MetaphorTestStory FrameworkOutcomesAbilities RubricCriteriaHeuristics

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 Internship portfolio  Graduation 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 Tracy Wright  Manju Poudel 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.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.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.Quellencia Hall  Example: Latrice Darnell.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