Task 15 -- Communicative approach

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Date Posted: 15:48:58 08/10/03 Sun
Author: Andr�a Maria da Silva
Subject: Task 15

Portfolios are purposeful collections of students� work that demonstrates to students and others their efforts, progress, and achievements in given areas. Portfolios used in classrooms today had been inspired by professionals such as photographers and architects as a means of keeping a record of their accomplishments to show others. A portfolio may be a folder, a small cardboard box, a section of a file drawer, or some other receptacle. Regardless of the place portfolios are kept, they should be readily accessible to students and teachers.
They may be consisted of a wide variety of materials: teacher notes, teacher-completed checklists, student self- reflections, reading logs, sample journal pages, written summaries, audiotapes of retellings or oral readings, videotapes of group projects, and so forth.. Another option would be portfolios that contain a student's best pieces and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces. It may also contain one or more works-in-progress that illustrate the creation of a product, such as an essay, evolving through various stages of conception, drafting, and revision.
Portfolios capitalize on students' natural tendency to save work and become an effective way to get them to take a second look and think about how they could improve future work. As any teacher or student can confirm, this method is a clear departure from the old write, hand in, and forget mentality, where first drafts were considered final products. Portfolios can serve as a vehicle for enhancing student awareness of these strategies for thinking about and producing work--both inside and beyond the classroom. However, good portfolio projects do not happen without considerable effort on the part of teachers.
Portfolios provide:
- a continuos, cumulative record of language development;
- a holistic view of student learning;
- insights about progress of individual students;
- opportunities for collaborative assessment and goal-setting with students;
- tangible evidence of student learning to be shared with parents, other educators, and other students;
- opportunities to use metalanguage to talk about language.
Teachers are showing increased interest in assessment in the classroom; assessment which includes authentic and performance-based measures. These methods of assessment allow students to demonstrate desired performance through real-life situations (Meyer, 1992). Portfolios are one of such methods. It requires students to demonstrate their problem-solving skills as well as their skills in analyzing and synthesizing information. Portfolios can be thought of as a form of "embedded assessment"; that is, the assessment tasks are a part of instruction. Teachers determine important instructional goals and how they might be achieved. Through observation during instruction and collecting some of the artifacts of instruction, assessment flows directly from the instruction (Shavelson, 1992). Another important dimension of portfolio assessment is that it should actively involve the students in the process of assessment
Portfolios can contextualize and provide a basis for challenging formal test results based on testing that is not authentic or reliable. All too often students are judged on the basis of a single test score from a test of questionable worth (Darling-Hammong & Wise, 1985; Haney & Madaus, 1989). Student performance on such tests can show day-to-day variation. However, such scores diminish in importance when contrasted with the multiple measures of reading and writing that are part of a portfolio.
The perceived benefits for assessment are that the collection of multiple samples of student work over time enables the teacher to:
- get a broader, more in-depth look at what students know and can do;
- base assessment on more "authentic" work;
- have a supplement or alternative to report cards and standardized tests;
- have a better way to communicate student progress to parents.
Assessment uses of portfolios are not without controversy. Some of these issues are:
- the extent to which we need to "standardize" the portfolio process, content, and performance criteria so that results are comparable;
- the feasibility to accurately and consistently assess student skills through portfolios;
- the financial cost;
- how to get teachers to buy-in the idea;
- the validity of conclusions drawn about students from their portfolios be valid ( it may not be really the students' work..

Bibliography
www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/classuse.html
www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/assess6.html
www.ericfacility.net/ericdigests/ed388890.html

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Replies:

Re: Task 15 -- Vera Menezes, 15:44:42 08/13/03 Wed