Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of the Portfolio

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Electronic Student Assessment: The Power of the Portfolio

8/29/2006

By Matt Villano

They’re not just evaluation tools anymore. Savvy educators are seeing endless ways to exploit the power of the ePortfolio — and you can, too.

At Bentley College (MA), the interdisciplinary Liberal Studies program has undergone quite a makeover: Educators there have completely revamped the way in which they assess student performance in class. For years, the process was “old school”—students were required to submit all work in person, printing out assignments on paper, stapling them, and handing them over to professors upon request. These days, however, the school handles assessment with nextgeneration ePortfolio tools that enable students and teachers to exchange assignments electronically.

What’s so interesting, though, is that the technology is the architecture of the major itself, acting as the mechanism by which curricular objectives are supported and measured. Barbara Palmer, dean for information resources, says that faculty members designing the major had ePortfolios in mind from the get-go. On one level, the technology evaluates individual success. Collectively, however, the ePortfolios can be mined to get a sense of overall program quality. What’s more, because the Bentley program requires a great deal of student self-reflection and faculty adviser feedback, Palmer says the ePortfolios have become source material by which to gauge the value of the facultystudent interaction. “This initiative seeks to increase students’ ability to integrate learning and to make connections,” she reports. “We expect to use [ePortfolios] to evaluate our capacity to deliver on our curricular promises.”

Bentley is not alone; across the country, a growing number of schools such as Iowa State University, Wesleyan University (CT), the University of Denver (CO), the University of Texas-Austin , and the University of Hawaii are turning to ePortfolio assessment technologies to help them monitor and evaluate student progress in a variety of disciplines—and to help them and their students do even more. Across the board, educators report that their ePortfolio efforts have revolutionized the learning process, and the technologies they utilize seem to improve every day, further enabling and enhancing the efforts. What’s more, given the bells and whistles (and price tags) of all sorts of recent technology releases, those tools commonly utilized in the ePortfolio paradigm are relatively inexpensive, easy to use, and scalable to an expanding user environment. Perhaps most importantly, students—the ones who use electronic portfolios every day—like them.

Challenges, of Course

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.