April 28, 2005
Contest honors outstanding student portfolios
Student digital portfolios have become an increasingly popular means to assess student learning. Since the introduction of Catalyst Portfolio three years ago, students have created over 30,000 electronic portfolios. And some of the best of the lot were recognized recently at a Catalyst Spark Session held in Mary Gates Commons.
A panel of faculty evaluated almost 150 entries. They chose one grand prize winner, Ann H. Wong, and three honorable mention winners, Krystle Jurnawan, David Winters and Island Pinnick. Ten finalists were also recognized.
The purpose of the contest, according to Tom Lewis, director of the Catalyst Group in Educational Partnerships & Learning Technologies, was to help spread information to the UW community about what students are doing with electronic portfolios.
“We’ve only been using electronic portfolios as a component of education for about three years,” he says. “But with about 30,000 portfolios in existence, we’re one of the largest cohorts in the nation.”
Portfolios are required for all students who participate in Freshman Interest Groups. In addition, there are more than 2,000 instructor-created projects involving portfolios. The College of Education has mandated portfolios for its graduate students in teacher education. And a growing number of students are learning about portfolios on their own.
Lewis reports that when he attends national meetings about portfolios, there is a great deal of discussion about the nature of portfolios and what an ideal portfolio should contain. “We’ve taken a different approach,” he says. “We’ve decided to ask students how they would like to use a portfolio and what makes it successful. Then we can conduct research on how faculty can help students to produce them.”
For purposes of the contest, Catalyst divided portfolios into three categories: academic, personal, and those pertaining to a student’s career. But the elements of a good electronic portfolio are the same, regardless of the intent.
In a well-designed portfolio, Lewis says, there is a close connection between the explanatory text and the digital artifacts (products of the student’s work, such as drafts of papers at different stages of production, video, audio, original works of art and other creations). There’s a mixture of things to see and read, and the purpose and audience of the portfolio are clear.
“Students who are creating portfolios should be conscious of the significance of their writing voice,” says Ann Stevens, a lecturer in the School of Art and the Department of Architecture and one of the contest’s judges. “You need to consider your audience.” For teachers who have incorporated the creation of portfolios into their curriculum, Stevens advises faculty to encourage students to read widely, and to look critically at the Web sites that they visit.
“Students are looking for ways to present themselves online,” says Cara Lane, a researcher with the Catalyst Group. “Even if they’ve created other things online before, with a portfolio they need to consider such issues as navigation and design, because those issues really matter if an idea is to be conveyed effectively. Many students are just becoming aware of the possibilities open to them — for putting original art online, showing the progress of written work through successive drafts, or for using the portfolio as a scrapbook. Different kinds of classes and different disciplines suggest different possibilities.”
Students who were honored with awards ran the gamut of disciplines, from technical communication (where portfolio design was part of a class assignment), to physics, architecture, visual design and business. They agreed that creating a portfolio was more time consuming than their typical class project. Indeed, preliminary research suggests that a familiarity with visual design, use of image editing programs, Web authoring programs, or a knowledge of basic HTML is helpful in designing a strong portfolio.
But the Catalyst Group has developed a Portfolio Tool (http://catalyst.washington.edu/tools/ppp.html) that students without many of these skills can use. The software helps students collect artifacts, reflect on the contents of their collection, and present their work to a variety of audiences. One of the goals of the contest, and the research that is being conducted on how students use portfolios, is to make the tool more useful.
“We know that the tool needs to be more flexible,” Lewis says, “and it needs to incorporate more options for design. The students have given us some very practical advice for improving the software. We’re learning from the students who used the software, but also from those that chose not to use it.”
Information about the contest winners is at http://catalyst.washington.edu/events/past_SS3.html.
