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Speaking My Mind
Portfolio Assessment: When Bad Things Happen to Good Ideas
Portfolios are a simple yet powerful idea. Students save their writing, revisit their work, and reflect upon it. They take pride in the pieces that show accomplishment and growth, and they note the shortcomings of less satisfactory work. Students select the stories, poems, and essays that represent their best writing and improve these pieces as their insight, skill, and energy allow. They write rationales in which they describe the strengths and weaknesses of their writing. Finally, students organize their writing and rationales into a folder and share it with someone. That person responds to it, either orally or in writing.
Articles and books have been written, workshops given, and statewide assessments launched on the variation and elaboration of this simple idea. Portfolios are a valuable classroom practice and one with many applications to the world students will enter when they leave our classrooms. But the use of portfolios to assess distorts the concept and weakens its effectiveness.
Assessment calls for the application of a set of standards embodied in a rubric and compares the achievement of students to these standards. This comparison, this assessment, should be accurate, timely, and practical in terms of time and energy required. The use of portfolios for assessment lacks these qualities. Furthermore, among the benefits of portfolios are the discovery of one's own strengths and weaknesses as a writer and the sharing of one's accomplishments with others. Using portfolios for assessment weakens these benefits.
One of the central concepts of portfolios is the choosing of one's best writing and the reflection that this demands. Let's assume that, in order to apply a rubric and assess a student's portfolio, his or her choice of pieces must be narrowed somewhat. Perhaps the rubric calls for a piece of text-based writing,. a narrative, a persuasive essay, and a poem. Already the concept of reflecting on the entire body of work and the choosing of one's best has been violated. A student may have little interest in or skill at analyzing and writing about literature, while he or...