_Assessing the Portfolio

Chapter-3: Portfolios: Practice
As the second word in the title indicates, this chapter attempts to give the specific, practical details of the use of portfolios in various settings. Drawing heavily on their experience developing portfolio programs at CU Denver and The University of Michigan, the authors break the chapter into three sections:

Portfolios in the Writing classroom

Picturing the Portfolio Program

Portfolio Based Writing Assessments.

In the opening section, the authors suggest that some of the "best composition practices" are supported (elevated, enhanced) by the specific intentions of portfolios. Drafting, revision, peer critique collaborative learning, reflective writing and the writer’s workshop classroom structure are all enhanced by the use of portfolios where students reflect, self assess, and critique their own writing and learning. Portfolios make the "intellectual work" of the writing classroom apparent. More importantly, using portfolios in the classroom forces the writer to also be a reader: "A writer’s workshop approach puts the writer on the other side, the side where the reader is--an important place to be in preparing a portfolio for assessment" (69).
The authors emphasize the importance of reflection in making the portfolio a "site of learning." Reflection expands the way a writer can show competence, beyond "writing skills." The authors do point out potential problems with the reflective letter as students become familiar with the rhetorical moves necessary to succeed in showing reflection. In addition, they recognize that some critics argue that the reflective letter can overtly influence portfolio graders’ judgments.
The second section expands the discussion of the uses of portfolios beyond individual classrooms. According to the authors, a good Portfolio Program takes the seven "C"s into consideration:

development of a teacher Community

shared Criteria and standards

shared locus of Control (teachers, students, administrators)

responsiveness to the needs and goals of the Context (including all parties to the assessment), and to all of its restrictions

valuing the process of reaching Consensus

Care in all aspects and phases of the development, application, maintenance and validation of the assessment

emphasis on Conversation about texts and processes in all of the above.
In narrative form, the writers go through their experiences setting up portfolio based programs for exit from the writing program; portfolios at entry to the writing program; portfolios across the curriculum; portfolios at graduation; portfolios for articulation between colleges; and portfolios and the assessment of nonnative and minority writers. As is list indicates, it is a major theme of this chapter that portfolio programs are site and context specific, and like all assessments, portfolios should be driven by the outcome desired (in other words, one size does not fit all). The authors relate all aspects of initiating and running portfolio programs including lists of the contents of portfolios, descriptions of grading sessions, instances of faculty resistance, and admissions of mistakes made. Some issues are continually raised: to do a portfolio program right requires a lot of money (for example, instructors were paid to visit each others’ classes); continual adjustments and evaluation of needs is a necessity; and a portfolio program involves people from diverse areas within the university, including the support of the administration. The writers emphasize the benefits of portfolios for faculty development, reflection and change: "...they do introduce many new possibilities to the thinking of each individual teacher..." (75). They also highlight that portfolio programs, once in place, can seem to go smoothly, but need to be reassessed and continually monitored for their effectiveness. "You are never finished: the program can never look after itself" (80).
Overall, the tone of the chapter is positive and optimistic, as when they claim that although the budget for the portfolio program at Michigan was close to 50 percent higher than the impromptu test, administrators were pleased because of the "tangible and intangible" benefits to the new system. Certainly some data they provide supports their contentions about portfolios: they provide statistics that indicate students in portfolio classes rate the teacher and the course higher and that teachers involved in portfolio systems trust the portfolio as a good indicator of students’ performance in the course. Too often, however, the authors make persuasive but unsubstantiated claims: they suggest that portfolio systems increase retention; that students using portfolios to apply to college were impressed by the individual attention and accepted admittance at a higher rate than before; and that instituting a portfolio based system for entry to college encouraged improved high school pedagogical practices (because teachers are teaching to the portfolio rather than the 50 minute impromptu). The chapter devalues itself with over-the-top claims: "Portfolio assessment gives students at once a greater investment in their writing and an empowering sense that the university values students as individuals--that students’ experiences count for something..." (92).
As they have suggested throughout, the authors underscore that portfolios are context specific: setting up exit portfolios is different than setting up graduation portfolios for example. They also admit that setting up portfolio assessments is more difficult at universities where the majority of writing courses are taught by TAs and graduate students, a problem they experienced first hand at Michigan. They underscore the relationship between the portfolio and course curriculum. "Most importantly, however, the portfolio was both a product of the course’s curriculum and an expression of it" (78). And they emphasize how portfolios benefit students: the portfolio requires self reflection; it forces students to take responsibility for their own learning; drafting, deep revision and peer editing all help the students grow over time. A large portion of the end of the chapter is devoted to detailing how portfolios can effectively be used in support of a WAC program.
"Portfolio-based writing assessment extends WAC’s assumptions, even, one might say, allows them to be realized in concrete form....WAC and portfolio-based assessment are natural partners" (93). The authors make a strong case for how portfolios can break down barriers between disciplines and help faculty as well as students see the similarities in the reading, writing, thinking and learning in a variety of fields. They detail two WAC portfolio programs, one a success and the other thwarted by hesitant faculty before it could even get moving. The latter underscores one of their main points: like WAC itself, WAC portfolios can not be foisted upon disciplines. Faculty have to be assured "...that no ‘portfolio police’ wait out there ready to legislate the rights or wrongs of a particular kind, and that each faculty member can develop a portfolio assessment that fits his own needs..." (96). After briefly treating portfolios for graduation, the authors take on the subject of portfolios for articulation between college settings.
They present the case that using a portfolio as a requirement for a student to transfer into a school (especially from community to 4-year college) often results in a rethinking of the goals and desires of the writing program itself. In a recurring theme in the book, the authors strongly believe that portfolios can influence curriculum, pedagogy and program planning. Similarly, it is suggested that portfolios also close the gap between different levels of schooling. "An entry portfolio assessment ... calls the fragmentation [between a CC and a 4-year college, for example] into question, forcing participants on both sides of the boundary to learn about each other, about each other’s practices, values and expectations, in order to help learners make the transition" (102). The authors claim that as entry level criteria are put into place, they call into question the exit criteria for the previous level as well as the requirements for the level above. At CU- Denver, "(t)he process of examining our own program’s portfolios, and making explicit what we expected in them, showed us that there was very little movement of expectations from the lowest level to the research paper course" (106). In other words, all of their courses were requiring the same sort of generalities: clarity, evidence of development etc. Portfolios, according to the authors, provide the trigger mechanism for evaluation of program goals, and also provide the solution to the discontinuity in writing requirements between different levels of schooling. The cooperative, open process of developing a portfolio program forces faculty to define what it is they want their students to be able to do. The authors devote three pages to tackling the issue of how the use of portfolios affect the assessment of nonnative and minority writing. They believe that ESL, bilingual, and home language writers benefit from portfolio based writing basically for the same reasons that all writers benefit: reflection, drafting, revision, more than one opportunity to show your writing ability etc. They avoid the larger issues of whether portfolios from nonative or minority writers face more scrutiny than other portfolios, whether they are different at all in terms of content, writing style, grading etc. They offer no narrative from CU Denver or Michigan as to how this was handled. This section is the weakest part of the chapter.
The chapter closes, disappointingly, with a section subtitled: "The Great Diversity" where the authors claim "there are many, many portfolio assessment programs across the country, and the number grows greatly every year" (113). However, they offer no statistical evidence as to the number or type of portfolio programs out there, nor do they indicate the percent of growth over the last few years.
After doing my summary for chapter three I am left with three issues:

"So far then, our central premise has been that all parties to a portfolio program will care about and take care in all aspects and phases of the development, application, maintenance, and validation of the assessment" (75). In the margin I write: "Is portfolio only about student assessment?" I guess I am asking this question with two things in mind. First: while it’s true that we must assign grades in all courses, and if portfolios are being used for a system wide assessment check of writing, certainly these require some form of evaluation and grading. What would an unevaluated portfolio look like? Would anyone do one? Can a teacher respond without evaluating or assessing? Would such a response have any advantages?

Secondly, can portfolios be used for other reasons besides student assessment? Can portfolios tell us about the classrooms in which they were constructed? Can they be used as part of a teacher evaluation process, or a program evaluation process? The second issue is how little time the authors spend on issues of nonnative and minority writers in relation to portfolios. And that led me to think of how little of the students’ voices made it into this book. They often talk about how good portfolios are for the students, and they sometimes reference survey data that indicates that students like portfolios, but there is no qualitative or quantitative or even anecdotal data that really investigates what students think and feel about portfolios.

Finally, the book doesn’t answer it, and it seems neither can we: how many portfolio programs exist and what are they used for and how successful are they?