About the e-portfolio Symposium
By: Ross Miller
For me, e-portfolio use is all about expectations and Greater Expectations. Teaching all of our students, and teaching all students to higher levels was a dual challenge that (as Randy Bass mentioned) basically established a logical (and one hopes inevitable) drive to spread the practice of using portfolios for learning. (If you are thinking that I neglected to include assessment, then you may still be thinking of assessment as separate from the process of learning.)
The Greater Expectations project advocated for all of us to find intentional approaches to liberal education – working to develop intentional learners, teachers, and institutions. If we really intend to be intentional while also working within the limits of time, then we must focus on those practices that produce the greatest effects. Portfolios and their electronic progeny have long pointed toward a handful of powerful practices of which we should be more conscious and use much more often.
- Metacognition: Bransford et al. (How People Learn, National Academy of Sciences) devote a considerable number of pages to metacognition – having students examine their own processes of thinking and problem solving. Examples in the book and research data paint a picture of the powerful advantages students accrue when they engage in metacognitive practice.
- Self-assessment: Related to metacognition (at least in my book), I teach students to self-assess so they go immediately to the top level of Bloom’s (old) taxonomy. Start them off assessing just as you do on the first day of orientation and build to graduation.
- Reflection: A variation of self-assessment that is the heart of portfolio practice. The Arts Propel project from the late 1980s incorporated reflections in what they called “process portfolios” – portfolios in which arts students looked over several pieces of their work to discern their own progress, note challenges, and plan their own improvement.
- Formative assessment: Effect size for formative assessment is huge. For the sophisticated projects that are often included in portfolios, formative assessments in the process of completing the project can be vital to raising students’ expectations for what they are capable of producing. As a music teacher, my work was both to help my students through formative assessments in rehearsals and lessons and to teach them to conduct self-assessment so that their practice would actually improve their next performance. Could that idea of knowing enough to improve performance without the teacher present apply to other fields of learning?
We can intentionally choose to be “intrusive advisers,” setting high expectations for our students and teaching them to engage in metacognition, reflection, and assessment from the beginning of their college experience.
Our highest aspirations for learning are quite often affective outcomes – love of learning, passion for truth, engagement – but they are often linked in a chicken/egg relationship with cognitive success. The practices associated with portfolios build success for students in both domains – just look at the cognitive and affective successes displayed in the LaGuardia portfolios! The expectations are high, the practices intentionally chosen, the results are compelling. What do you think?
Ross Miller is the senior director of assessment at Berkeley College in New York and New Jersey.
