The nine characteristics of portfolios:
According the Hamp-Lyons and Condon there are nine characteristics of portfolios. These characteristics may be found in any portfolio system, but they are not necessarily found/developed by all portfolio systems equally. Part of Hamp-Lyons and Condon's project here is to establish their characteristics in order to relate them to theories of writing (or more accurately in my mind writing pedagogies).
The nine characteristics are:
- collection: "collection, then, is the source of the portfolio's greater face validity, of its ability to represent the writer more fully than earlier forms of assessment allowed" (33). That is, the portfolio judges more than a single performance
- range: the writer is able to use different genres that show off different areas of expertise
- context richness: "portfolio assessment ... assumes that writers bring their experiences, in the form of their writings, with them into the assessment.... This characteristic means that instruction and assessment are intertwined, that the context within which the learning took place determines the contents of the portfolio" (34).
- delayed evaluation: students can go back and revise their work, they are building a portfolio not in a day but over the course of a semester or a year
- selection: "The act of making the selection leads writers to implicit--and often explicit--decisions about quality" (35)
- student-centered control: the learner is responisble for his/her success
- reflection and self-assessment: this is especially related to the letter that some portfolios require, it is the act of returning to a corpus of texts and reflecting upon those works
- growth along specific parameters: the portfolio allows evaluators to ask specific questions such as "Has the writer developed a stronger ability to write unified essays?" or "Has a writer become a better speller?" (36)
- development over Time: "Readers can trace the development of each piece" (37).