Learning Activity Portfolio – Course Assessment Portfolio
The purpose of this portfolio is to document what students learned during the tenure of the course. It outlines the content of the curriculum, achievements and reflective comments. As such, the items in the portfolio is designed to elicit the knowledge and skill specified in the course learning outcomes. This course assessment tasks brings the curriculum outcomes to life; only by specifying precisely what students has done and how well they apply the learning to the real-world situations. The course assessment portfolio is used in this contest to demonstrate mastery in the course.
Further, the portfolio is intended for the instructor who may become convinced that the objectives of an instructional unit have been mastered or who may decide to place students in advanced classes or special sections. Students will use this as a way to provide evidence of their significant learning.
The course assessment portfolio will follow eight distinct steps. Since portfolio entries represent a type of performance, these steps resemble the principles for developing good performance assessments.
1. Determining the curricular objectives to be addressed through the portfolio.
2. Determining the decisions that will be made based on the portfolio assessments. Will the assessments be used for high-stakes assessment at certain levels of education (for example, to enable students to make the transition from one course to another).
3. Designing assessment tasks for the curricular objectives. Ensure that the task matches instructional intentions and adequately represents the content and skills (including the appropriate level of difficulty) students are expected to attain. These considerations will ensure the validity of the assessment tasks.
4. Defining the criteria for each assessment task and establish performance standards for each criterion.
5. Determining who will evaluate the portfolio entries. Will they be other instructors, from OL, or senior OL faculty members?
6. Training other instructors or other evaluators to score the assessments. This will ensure the reliability of the assessments.
7. Teaching the curriculum, administer assessments, collect them in portfolios, score assessments.
8. As determined in Step 2, make decisions based on the assessments in the portfolios.
Considering the cardinal objectives of the assessment portfolio, assessment portfolios raise many important practical and pedagogical issues, particularly if they are used for high-stakes decisions. Portfolios can be used to establish that students have mastered the essential elements of the curriculum and can be contingent on demonstrating this mastery. In cases like this, it is essential that the procedures used to evaluate student work in the portfolio meet standards of validity and reliability.
For example, how will student products be evaluated if student writing or mathematical problem solving is included in the portfolio? And how will practitioners be sure that the products are good enough, that the work is of high quality? By what criteria will student work be assessed? To answer these questions, scoring guides, or rubrics, with clear criteria and descriptions of different levels of performance are developed.
Links:
Camp, Roberta. 1993. “The Place of Portfolios in Our Changing Views.” In Construction
versus Choice in Cognitive Measurement: Issues in Constructed Response, Performance Testing, and Portfolio Assessment, ed. Randy E. Bennett and William C. Ward. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Chen, Yih-Fen, and Martin, Michael A. 2000. “Using Performance Assessment and Portfolio
Assessment Together in the Elementary Classroom.” Reading Improvement 37 (1):32–37.
Cole, Donna H.; Ryan, Charles W.; and Kick, Fran. 1995. Portfolios Across the Curriculum and
Beyond. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
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