Our motto for our eportfolios at Macaulay (one of our mottoes–I tend to proliferate mottoes) is “Collect, Reflect, Present.”  That spells out (not necessarily in order of priority) what I thought students would be doing with eportfolios, and those goals, from the beginning, have shaped the choices in building our platform. But there is another purpose to which eportfolios are frequently put, and it’s a purpose that I want to untangle a little in this post.

We don’t say “Collect, Reflect, Present, Assess.”  (Although it could be easily argued, and I’ll argue a bit below, that “Reflect” really can be a kind, an excellent kind, of assessment).  We didn’t implement a system or a platform that was primarily designed to assess our students’ or our program’s fulfillment of predetermined or externally structured criteria.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we have a system that works more organically, more flexibly, allowing students to determine for themselves what (if anything) will happen with their eportfolios, what they will collect, reflect, and present, and even what they will assess.  And as I described in that previous post, that choice of approach has had implications for what quality of eportfolios we get (in a very good way), and implications for what quantity of eportfolios we get (in a way we’re working on improving).

But we have also reached a point where assessment can be very productive–not the kind of assessment that checks whether standards are met or pre-designed structures filled in. I would call that kind of assessment “measuring up” (as in “does this eportfolio measure up?”).  We’re at the point where we can do something more difficult, but (possibly) more substantive and more useful…”measuring” (as in “how can we describe what is happening with this eportfolio? What does it tell us about this student?”)

For a long time I had a sort of inferiority complex about the question of assessment in regard to our eportfolios, because our approach is really not well-suited to the kind of quantitative, universal, standardized approach that many people mean when they say “assessment.” Because what our students are doing with their eportfolios takes so many different forms, it’s not easily possible to say “yes, this one measures up.  No, this one falls short.”

And the more I thought about this, the more I began to think back to my own history with portfolio assessment (before the “e” even existed) as a writing teacher. I thought about how and why portfolio assessment entered writing instruction and where it came from. The whole point of portfolio assessment, originally, in writing instruction, was to provide alternate assessments–richer ones. More nuanced and complicated ones. To assess the things (like writing ability) that are NOT easily or accurately assessed by a single test, or a single score.

Portfolios in writing instruction were about growth, about process, about diversity. They were implemented specifically because the picture of a student as a writer can not be reduced to just data or skills. Writing teachers sat with students’ portfolios for long periods of time. They looked at everything. They read drafts and students’ reflections of how drafts became final products. They read students’ thoughts about what each piece of writing said about the student as a writer. They thought about students’ choices, and their reasoning for their choices.  They thought about what and why students were collecting.  How and when they were reflecting on what they collected.  Where and to whom and how they were presenting what they collected.

Portfolio assessment at its best can be qualitative assessment, formative assessment.  Not just summative assessment leading to a grade or a score or a single evaluation, but deep description leading to more process and more progress, feeding back into more recommendations and more learning for the student, for the eportfolio system, and for the program.

I’m not sure why I originally fell into a prejudice that this kind of deep assessment was somehow “soft” or “just anecdotal.” Somehow not “real” or “valid” assessment. I know very well from my own research and scholarship that true observation and deep description are not less effective and less important than numbers and graphs or rubrics and scores.  In fact, in many cases, in many disciplines and types of research, from participant observation fieldwork to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, I know very well that measuring is actually often superior–more comprehensive, more insightful, more  detailed, more useful for planning and changing and learning, even more  accurate and “objective” and transferable–to measuring up.

Rather than scoring on a rubric, or checking off items on a list of competencies (and I do not want to imply that “measuring up” like that is never valuable), the kinds of questions we can be asking about eportfolios (and are starting to ask)–measuring, studying, deep assessment questions–are the kinds of questions that always get asked in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Pat Hutchings (in the introduction to Opening Lines: Approaches to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) frames them like this:

• “What works?”
• “What is?”
• “Visions of the possible”
• “Theory building” questions