November 7, 2002
Portfolio project lets students reflect on their learning
Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living. A group of UW researchers and teachers have taken Socrates’ words to heart and are applying them to the educational process here, providing students with greater opportunities for examining their academic life. The result could be a profound change in the culture of education.
A team of technology experts, researchers and faculty has developed an electronic portfolio that will help students collect their work, collaborate with instructors and advisers, and present their accomplishments on the Web. The electronic portfolio is in many ways an extension of an approach that has been used for centuries in the arts and humanities.
The tool is part of the Catalyst suite of online technologies to enhance teaching and learning. Unlike many of the other tools, this was designed primarily for student use, according to Mark Farrelly, outreach and special projects coordinator with Educational Partnerships & Learning Technologies.
“In talking with teachers, administrators and advisers, we found that all of them agreed that students should develop a more holistic sense of their education and have opportunities to reflect on the journey that they are taking,” he says.
Each student, through Portfolio, will be able to put virtually anything digital into a personal file. This could range from academic accomplishments to favorite songs. Furthermore, anything put in a portfolio can be published on the Web with the push of a button, without the student having to worry about learning formatting commands, and still produce professional-looking results. How students will use these powerful tools is anyone’s guess, or dream.
Portfolio development is a national issue, with universities such as Stanford, University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon and MIT trying to work together to develop some common tools. But the UW portfolio tool is one of the few that is now ready for prime time. Its origin goes back to discussions that began on campus several years ago.
Many educators have long believed that a portfolio is a much better gauge for student learning than tests alone, and that the act of creating a portfolio is itself a valuable learning experience. But paper portfolios have proven cumbersome and unwieldy, and interaction with faculty around portfolios, outside of studio classes, was difficult.
The Program for Educational Transformation Through Technology (PETTT) recently conducted research on electronic portfolios and convened focus groups of individuals who might use them. These included not just classroom teachers and students, but administrators, career counselors and advisers.
Scott Macklin, director of PETTT, believes that the portfolio tool is a logical counterpart to the educational transformation that has resulted in a move to active learning—which includes problem-based curricula in health sciences, service learning in engineering and the social sciences, and portfolio-based assignments in the arts and humanities. “For many students, the portfolio will help make the process of learning more visible,” he says
For Jennifer Turns, assistant professor of technical communication, the project extends what she has been doing in her Introduction to Technology class. “The challenge in that class has been to add more substance, to steer it away from simply being a class in web development,” she says. This fall, students will be creating two kinds of portfolios. One will be a professional portfolio, to showcase the skills they have developed by displaying their “artifacts” (any object or digital product of a student’s efforts) and highlighting their features, much as someone in the field would do for a client or prospective client. The second portfolio will give students an opportunity to reflect on what they learned in the class, what was their best work and their weakest work, what skills they have mastered and which still need development.
Turns has been using portfolios in her class for a while, so she was recruited to participate in a PETTT focus group and to talk with the developers of the portfolio tool. When it was released for instructors, the tool contained a feature that allowed the construction of “mentored” or guided portfolios. With a mentored portfolio, instructors ask students questions, encouraging their reflections on what they have learned. This could result in items being added to the portfolio and others being deleted, as well as providing for exploration of the goals in the class and whether they have been achieved. When the student has satisfactorily addressed the questions, and the portfolio has assumed a shape that the teacher thinks is satisfactory, the portfolio is released and becomes the exclusive property of the student.
Turns plans to use the portfolios in a new center for graduate engineering students who are thinking about careers in teaching. “We’ll be able to create portfolios that include students’ teaching experience, whether as a mentor, a tutor or a TA,” she says. “They’ll have a chance to reflect on their teaching experience, and the portfolio will help them decide if teaching is a good career choice for them.”
She would also like to explore how portfolios can help students integrate their learning across the curriculum. She is seeking funding to develop portfolio tools and conduct research on how students’ knowledge of careers in engineering evolves with their educational experience.
“Year by year, we can help students explore what they know about what it means to be a mechanical engineer or civil engineer,” she says. “The portfolio can help them makes sense of all their classes and integrate their experience. We’re training students for a profession, so it’s important that they know what the profession entails.”
Mentored portfolios will be used not just in academic classes but also by offices such as the Center for Career Services and Undergraduate Advising, which will supply students with a series of questions about career choices or choosing a major.
The School of Medicine will be using portfolios to help track student progress and to facilitate communication between medical students and mentors. Medical students receive their education in a variety of settings throughout the region (and beyond). Each mentor is assigned six students to look after.
In the second year of medical education, as students take Introduction to Clinical Medicine, Part 2, they will share what they are learning about interviewing, examining and working up patients with their mentors.
In the third and fourth year, they will continue to share their observations, writeups and other work in their clerkships with mentors. The goal of the portfolios is to provide greater continuity in students’ educational experience, providing a way of looking at student development and performance over a four-year period.
The Graduate School is preparing a developmental portfolio, emphasizing both reflective elements and interactive scholarship, providing services and information that are unique to the graduate student experience. The Graduate School’s portfolio project is expected to go online in the spring.
In its first year, the portfolio tool will be used by all 4,000 participants in Freshman Interest Groups. It will be part of a General Studies class that focuses on what it means to be a member of the UW community.
The portfolio will include what Farrelly calls “reflective prompts” that will help students describe themselves and their goals as freshmen. The product at the end of the course should give students a good reference point of who they are. The plan is to encourage them to look at this and add to it as their university experience progresses.
In addition to its use by freshmen and by those seeking information from the Center for Career Services and Undergraduate Advising (starting Winter Quarter), portfolios will be incorporated in the instructional program for second year medical students. Still, developers believe that these applications will just scratch the surface.
“In every case, Catalyst tools have quickly been used in ways we never imagined when designing them,” says Louis Fox, vice provost for educational partnerships and learning technologies. He points out that part of funds for the project comes from the Student Technology Fee. “Students immediately saw the importance of the portfolio tool for organizing the products of their learning, for reflection on what they’ve learned, and for presenting their accomplishments when they enter the world of work or apply to graduate school.”
“It will be very interesting to see how students reflect on their work here — what gets included in personal portfolios and what doesn’t. It will be interesting to see how faculty in a variety of disciplines use portfolios, and how the use of portfolios in teaching and learning will grow and deepen over time. My hope is that we will learn a lot from how this develops.”
Fox speculates that, if portfolios become a successful tool, we may see their use one day in the admissions process, not just for graduate students but for undergraduates as well.
“This tool is more complicated than many Catalyst tools, but it’s also one of the most exciting. I think that we will be surprised at how it is used. Many people nationally are curious to see what results we achieve.”
