Portfolio Assessment: A view of "self" within a system of educational expectations

In 1996,  Bonnie S. Sunstein, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Iowa, wrote 

"Assessing Portfolio As s e s sment :  Three Encounters of a Close Kind " offering an explanation of this form of assessment . I especially respect her explanation of portfolios being a way for one to view themselves against a standard of an"other". The questions she gathered from professionals to use with students are helpful to jump-start the highly complex  processes of reflection and reflextive thinking.

From: Voices from the Middle  Volume 3 Number 4  November 1996 

'via Blog this'

"...we  don't  allow  ourselves  or our  students  to look  hard  enough  at  what they've learned. When we  can't look, we  don't see..."

The  difference between portfolios  and other   forms  of  school  "assessments" is the voices of the portfolio-keepers looking internally at their  own  growth as it happens (reflection), and then looking externally toward what the school expects (reflexive). They create materials, examine  their  progress,  and design the opportunities to assess their own collections, self-evaluating  and  reflecting  about their work while  documenting  how it  stands  up against  a school's  expectations. Curriculum should not  be a mystery to students. When students assess their  own work by  reviewing it-describing,  listing,  and  analyzing  what they've done-they  begin to articulate their own learning within a teacher's curriculum.

Three Types of Portfolio Analysis

I. A Reflective Encounter: Self to Self 

• Taking the time to re-see one's self in light of the  other  is  a  highly sophisticated  "higher order critical skill."
• Reflection is what we  call analysis in literature, documentation in science, or exegesis in liturgy. It is hard to explain and even harder to arrange.

2. A Reflexive Encounter: Self to Other 

• The  reflection bridge  is  a  two-way  street.  
• A  student  comes to  learn  as  she reflects on her work, "but if you tell me what your standard is, I'll tell you how the stuff in my portfolio shows that I can meet your standard."
• This process is a reflexive  one.
•  A portfolio-keeping process must be at once reflective and reflexive
• Establishing opportunities for reflexivity is a matter of  allowing students to represent processes in a portfolio as well as in products. 
• Representing processes requires responsibility, ownership, a sense of agency

3. A Dialectical Encounter: Teacher as Mediator 

•  Portfolios  are valuable because they offer the opportunity for a "self' to set itself next  to  an "other" in  order  to  understand itself better. 
• They are valuable because they allow  an  individual to  assess-internally- her own  developing sense of standards, and then to  assess-externally-how  she meets those of her school and the communities to which  she  wants  to  belong.  
• And  teachers must be at the center of this process with students.
• A curriculum should never be  a mystery to  a student  who keeps a portfolio; it should provide a framework and a set of goals that the student  ought to  be able  to  meet  in  her  own way

The Reflective Encounter 

Questions that Identify, Clarify, and Look for Change 

(from experienced teachers)

Alan Purves, SUNY Albany 

• What do you know that you didn't know before? 
• What can you d o  that you couldn't do before? 
• What do you d o  that you couldn't do before? 

Jane Hansen, University of New Hampshire 

• What is different in your portfolio now than six months ago? 

J   Sommers, Miami  University, Ohio 

• How  are your writing and your composing processes different now than they were when you began compiling this portfolio? 
• Which class  activities  (journal  writing,  peer  response groups, revision, etc.) have affected your writing and your composing process this semester, and what effects have they had? 

Sally Hampton, New Standards Managtng 

Director;  1992-95  Portfolio Project, 

English/Language Arts 

• If  you were to choose one piece of work  that represents your best effort, what would you choose? 
• Why is it a significant effort? 
• When  you  revise  your  work, what  lenses do you  use  to determine what to change? 

Lora Wol f f ,  Keokuk High School, Iowa 

• After looking over all your artifacts, what is missing? 
• What connections exist among the artifacts in your portfolio? 
• Explain the connections. 

Brian Huot,  University of Louisville 

• Why have you chosen these specific pieces for your portfolio? 
• What makes these pieces interesting to you? 
• What surprises you about your work? 
• What would you do differently? 

Eunice Greer; Harvard PACE;  University of Illinois 

• What do you want people  to learn about you from reading your portfolio? 
• Show me where or how they would learn those things from looking at your work. 
• What's  something  that  you've  been  working to  improve? 
• Trace your growth in that area through the collection of your work.  (I want them to follow a thread of  an idea through a series of works that have been built over time and read their portfolio as a single body of work, not as a random set of unrelated works.) 

Nancie Atwell,  Center for  Teaching & Learning, Edgecomb, Maine 

• How  many  pieces  of  writing  did  you  finish this semester? 
• What genres are represented among these pieces? 
• What's the most important or useful information about conventions of written English you've learned this semester? 
• What will you try to do in your writing in the future? 

Judy Fueyo, Penn State University 

• If  you  think  of  your  work  according to  "level of  difficulty," what would you  choose as hardest and why? 
• Please describe what you were trying to do, even if you did not achieve it.

The Reflexive Encounter 

Questions that Encourage Representing the Self to an Other 

Chris Sullivan, Plainville High School,  Connecticut 

• Within the context of the overall picture of yourself that you are trying to create, what does this artifact show? 
• Think in terms of skills, knowledge, and personal impact as you  answer. What does this piece tell you about your goal for this period of time? 
• Does it say you are getting there? Have to work on a certain skill? Need more evidence for evaluation? 

Miles Myers, Executive Director; NCTE,  Urbana, Illinois 

• If you are reflecting for personal reasons about your work, do you have a life or a school career pattern into which these reflections fit?
• If you are trying to show someone else something about your reflections, how will you make these reflections visible and meaningful for the other person? 

Linda Carstens, San Diego  Unzjied School District, California 

• What should I know as a reader about this piece that will help me understand your thinking and work? 
• What would you do next to this piece to have it "tell your story" even more clearly? 

Sara Jordan, SUNY Albany, New  York 

• What do you want your work to say about you? What does your work say about you? 

Tom Romano, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 

• What things can you show me about your learning that I would otherwise not know about you.