Chapter-1: Portfolio Based Writing Assessment: Current Trends and Practices
The Dynamics of Context
Portfolio-based assessment examines multiple pieces of writing written over time under different constraints rather than an assessment of a single essay written under a specified time. Many programs are moving toward portfolio assessment as opposed to the traditional, holistic assessment as a response to reflective, local needs of students and programs. Hamp-Lyons and Condon say, "From the writer's perspective, a portfolio permits a better reflection of his or her effort and the range of writing. For faculty, a portfolio offers more writing, longer individual essays, and (for those who chose it) a view of the 'process history' that underlies completed texts" (6).
Changing the Assessment Paradigm
Writing assessment has not been directly linked to writing instruction. Traditionally, writing samples have been treated as a kind of scientific abstract objective. The SAT and ACT are examples of such positivist evaluations. It is, as the authors point out, necessary to shift from the positivist model of assessment to one of a constructivist paradigm, so that assessment, and those who assess, can cease to consider writing as a scientific act. The constructivist paradigm includes evaluation of students' work on a day to day basis, and also values the writing progress over time. The authors assert that, "a constructivist paradigm, in contrast (to a positivist one), leads to an assessment that incorporates evaluation into the learning experience, thus accepting and valuing the participants' (teachers and learners) perceptions of and judgments about the work they do in class from day to day and the levels of achievement on work that matters to the participants" (8).
A Short History of Writing Assessment
Standardized testing has been the most commonly used method to assess one's ability to write understandable prose from WW II until the late 1970's. It is apparent that these standardized tests are still used by some programs to allow students to receive credit for writing courses based on these scores. These standardized tests are characterized as "objective" but Hamp-Lyons and Condon believe the opposite: "These tests are not really objective because, although scoring is done by an objective machine, the questions are written by human beings and the 'right' answers are decided and programmed into the computer or coded onto a scoring template by human beings." Direct testing methods became more prominent during the late seventies and early eighties because of the previous reasons. However, direct testing methods, in the authors' opinion, were not adequate either. Direct testing involved highly structured prompts and limited the choices of writers. They also limited the time a writer had to take the test. Basically, the direct methods of testing eliminated the writing as a process approach because students had to rely heavily on drafting skills to perform well on the test. Now, colleges are filled with diverse campuses where writing prompts do not seem to consider the diversity of student populations. The direct testing methods used now are simply further complicating matters of testing and assessment. Hamp-Lyons and Condon claim that "these increasing complications demonstrate a need for better instructional and assessment tools, as definitions of literacy shift and as the interconnection between literacy and political consciousness is clarified" (13). Ultimately, Hamp-Lyons and Condon say that they, in spite of the complications, still believe that the "traditional one-shot, timed writing assessment" is much better than the standardized one. What we should do now is turn to the portfolio-based method of evaluating student writing in colleges.
Portfolio Based Writing Assessment: An Overview Portfolios and the Assessment Community
The Assessment Community is mostly comprised of psychometricians who, according to the authors, have been detached from education for quite some time, and tend to look at portfolios as an abstraction. This is because they look at all types of portfolios, not just writing. The political bouts that have been occurring in the US Dept. of Education are reflecting attitudes toward literacy that are somewhat vague in nature. While the education assessment community is making progress toward new methods of assessment, the increasing democratization of assessment and accountability "issues by well-intentioned bureaucrats remain[s] under siege from conservative forces in education, educational assessment, and bureaucracy itself" (18, 19). What has in fact opened the door for portfolio-based assessment is the need and desire of teachers, students, and parents to have a portfolio that reflects an emphasis on performance rather than the more traditional test scores. The portfolio then will serve as "the site for gathering together a student's performances" (22). One problem stemming from this desire is the fact that "performance assessment" sets the assessment community apart from teaching communities in ways that seemingly put the two respective groups apart from each other. This in itself clouds the goals of both communities and causes distrust between the two groups.
Portfolios in the K-12 Community
The difference between the assessment community and the teaching community, according to the authors, is that the assessment community is interested in the tests themselves, and that their interest in the effects of tests on the curriculum, teaching, and learning is mostly secondary (23). The teachers remain interested in what occurs in their classrooms, and to their students as a result of decisions made by the assessment community. The fact is that teachers know a lot about teaching, about their students, and about what happens in the day to day life of their classrooms. In particular, they know how children learn as they grow. It is also clear that teachers and their students are concerned about the methods with which their performances are measured. Teachers have found that standardized tests measure mostly lower ordered skills, and as a result those tests must be "irrelevant to local curricula, needs, and standards" (24). It is apparent that teachers are also aware of the time standardized tests take away from their classrooms. In effect, the teacher has to spend time teaching for the "test" rather than teaching students practical knowledge. The tests are geared toward performance rather than "teaching students to think strategically, to understand concepts and ideas in curricular domains, to apply what they learn, to be able to pose questions, and to be able to devise and solve problems" (25). What performance assessment promises to do is alleviate the barriers between these two communities. Portfolio assessment will enable both groups to concentrate on the same student generated products to assess student learning on particular tasks at specified points in a student's career.
Portfolios in the College Writing Community
At the college level few colleges have begun to require portfolios of student work to determine the most qualified students who may be exempt from first-year writing courses. The University of Michigan is the only school who assesses the writing of all incoming students by requiring them to submit a portfolio, but that has failed since the fall of 1999. Colleges use portfolios in a variety of ways: by individual teachers, as a way to assess students who may be qualified to be exempt from first-year composition, to examine a college's curriculum, as a diagnostic assessment as students move to their junior year, as a requirement to graduate from college, or as a means to prove that a student has met a writing-across-the-curriculum standard. The college community focuses the portfolio on single-subject areas like biology, math, writing, etc. This means that no agency, typically, steps back to evaluate learning in the same way that primary/secondary schools do. The authors claim that universities have accounted for the differing curricular, institutional, and political demands of their local context, so that universities now have enough practice to develop theory, and without that theory the progression of portfolios cannot evolve much further (28). The remaining chapters of the book focus on portfolios in the college writing community, leaving the K-12 community and assessment community to the study of others.
