Portfolio+Assessment+in+an+Online+Environment

Lesley University has established an e-Portfolio requirement for all Master's and CAGS students in the Technology in Education (TIE) program. The university believes that e-Portfolios offer the following advantages: Many of the underlying benefits to portfolio use that Lesley University has identified will also hold true for elementary, middle, and high school students. None may be more important, however, than the opportunity that e-Portfolios offer in supporting students reflecting upon their own learning. Student reflection has proven to be an integral component of improving achievement. The article, //Assessment without victims: An interview with Rick Stiggins,// discusses the effects that student involvement in assessment has upon student motivation and achievement. The following is a quote from that article:
 * Allows students to reflect on their learning and teaching.
 * Provides a medium to document student growth over time.
 * Helps students make connections between theory and practice.
 * Creates a means for student’s self-evaluation.
 * Promotes collaboration among students and their classmates, course instructors, and seminar leaders.
 * Ensures that each course assignment is unique to a course.
 * Demonstrates that students have met required program and state standards.

//"JSD:// A study in England found that **//many of the most successful instructional innovations used student self-assessments and peer assessments to strengthen formative assessment//** in the classroom. The study also found that improved formative assessment raised student achievement overall but that it helped low achievers most. //Stiggins:// I, too, have read that very important research. The key is to understand the relationship between assessment and student motivation. In the past, we built assessment systems to help us dole out rewards and punishment. And while that can work sometimes, it causes a lot of students to see themselves as failures. If that goes on long enough, they lose confidence and stop trying. We can also involve students in communicating what they learned, for example, through student-led conferences, which is probably one of the biggest breakthroughs in communicating about student achievement in the last century. Grant Wiggins says he wants classrooms in which there are no surprises and no excuses. //**Involve students deeply in the assessment process and that's what you get.**// //**Kids who have given up on learning are at the low end. If we can involve them in the assessment process to give them renewed confidence and motivation, they're likely to try harder and to succeed.**// The kids who had previously given up on themselves have rekindled interest and get renewed confidence when involved in high quality formative assessment." e-Portfolios provide a mechanism for distance learning students to reflect upon their own learning, participate in assessment, and hopefully increase their confidence and motivation to actively participate in the class.
 * //Students learn from assessments//**
 * //When students are involved in the assessment process, though, they can come to see themselves as competent learners. We need to involve students by making the targets clear to them and having them help design assessments that reflect those targets. Then we involve them again in the process of keeping track over time of their learning so they can watch themselves improving. That's where motivation comes from.//**

What role will e-Portfolio's play in your online course? In order to consider a response to this question you may want to consider the following:
 * 1) What is an e-Portfolio?


 * 1) What items should be contained within an e-Portfolio?

As your readings indicated, e-Portfolios are well poised to make effective use of Web 2.0 tools as a way of organizing and communicating student learning. Many students are already familiar with Web 2.0 tools from social networking, wiki, and blogging sites, and the use of tools provides relevancy, familiarity, and supports the creation of e-Portfolios that are more than scanned replications of static paper portfolios.
 * 1) What technologies should be present within an e-Portfolio?

Activity: Design of e-Portfolio

This week you will create a "draft" design of an e-Portfolios for your online course. The design should include:
 * 1) A list of key artifacts that might be included
 * 2) Provide the learning target/standard for the artifact
 * 3) Why/how this artifact is representative of the learning target/standard
 * 4) The technology that will be utilized in completing the artifact
 * 5) Provide an explanation for the selection of the technology, including the level of interactivity/communication supported by the tool.
 * 6) How does this technology take advantage of the "e" in an e-Portfolio?
 * 7) //Make sure to include at least one Web 2.0 tool//


 * 1) How does your e-Portfolio design "involve" students in the process of assessing their own learning?

=Evaluating an e-Portfolio = Helen Barrett describes the five stages of e-Portfolio development as: Each stage or step in this process requires formative evaluation prior to continuing with the next step in the e-Portfolio development. Recall that Richard Stiggins, as well as others, believes that student motivation and achievement are linked to their feelings of competency, and that assessment results may be the most important mechanism used by students to measure their level of competency. An instructor cannot wait until the end of a course to assess an e-Portfolio, rather, the student needs to see intermediary measures of competency to keep them focused and motivated to complete the coursework and the e-Portfoio.
 * 1) Determine the purpose, audience, and content
 * 2) Working portfolio: Developing the digital archive
 * 3) Reflective portfolio: What?, So What?, Now What?
 * 4) Connected portfolio: Creating a hyperlinked document, adding multimedia, making connections
 * 5) Presentation portfolio: Publishing and sharing

Activity:

The task this week is to design/adapt a series of checklists/rubrics for the completion of each stage of the e-Portfolio project. You are free to design the rubrics to:
 * 1) Iteratively build to a complete "final" rubric, that is, the rubric for each individual phase of the e-Portfolio completion contributes to the final rubric.
 * 2) Have separate rubric for each stage of the e-Portfolio project, including a separate rubric for the final completed e-Portfolio.
 * 3) The rubrics you design/adapt do not have to be authored by you (but they do need to be correctly cited if they are not original).
 * 4) If you adapt the work of others you will want to consider how the rubric you are adapting supports not only the planned e-Portfolio design, but the standards and learning targets the e-Portfolio is designed to measure.
 * 5) To this end if you adapt a rubric please post a copy of the original rubric as well as your proposed adaptation including a rationale for the changes that you made.

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