ePortfolios

A student eportfolio is a compilation of academic work and other forms of educational evidence assembled for the purpose of:

  1. evaluating coursework quality, learning progress, and academic achievement

  2. determining whether students have met learning standards or other academic requirements for courses or degree programs

  3. helping students reflect on their academic goals and progress as learners

  4. creating a lasting archive of academic work products, accomplishments, and other documentation.

Advocates of eportfolios argue that compiling, reviewing, and evaluating student work over time can provide a richer, deeper, and more accurate picture of what students have learned and are able to do than more traditional measures that only measure what students know at a specific point in time. ePortfolios may also be presented publicly or privately as part of a demonstration of learning, exhibition, or capstone project.

Photo Credit: Ukhikmat [CC BY-SA 4.0]

ePortfolios are a digital archives of that feature collections of student work that includes materials such as:

  • as written assignments

  • journal entries

  • artwork

  • lab reports

  • presentations

  • blogs

  • websites

  • videos and other multimedia presentations

  • other digital artifacts of learning.

Portfolios may also be but that may also include other material evidence of learning progress and academic accomplishment, including awards, honors, certifications, recommendations, written evaluations by instructors or peers, and self-reflections written by students.

It’s important to note that there are many different types of portfolios in education, and each form has its own purpose. For example, capstone portfolios would feature student work completed as part of long-term projects or final assessments typically undertaken at the culmination of an entire degree program. Some portfolios are only intended to evaluate learning progress and achievement in a specific course, while others are maintained for the entire time a student is enrolled.

The following arguments are often made by educators who advocate for the use of eportfolios in the classroom:

  • Student eportfolios are most effective when they are used to evaluate student learning progress and achievement. When portfolios are used to document and evaluate the knowledge, skills, and work habits students acquire, instructors can use them to adapt instructional strategies when evidence shows that students either are or are not learning what they were taught. Advocates typically contend that eportfolios should be integrated into and inform the instructional process, and students should incrementally build out eportfolios on an ongoing basis—i.e., eportfolios should not merely be an idle archive of work products that’s only reviewed at the end of a course or school year.

  • ePortfolios can help instructors and departments monitor and evaluate learning progress over time. Tests and quizzes give instructors information about what students know at a particular point in time, but eportfolios can document how students have grown, matured, and improved as learners over the course of a project, course, or degree program. For this reason, some educators argue that eportfolios should not just be compilations of a student’s best work, but rather they should include evidence and work products that demonstrate how students improved over time. For example, multiple versions of an essay can show how students revised and improved their work based on feedback from the teachers or their peers.

  • Portfolios help instructors determine whether students can apply what they have learned to new problems and different subject areas. A test can help instructors determine, for example, whether students have learned a specific mathematical skill. But can those students also apply that skill to a complex problem in economics, geography, civics, or history? Can they use it to conduct a statistical analysis of a large data set in a spreadsheet? Or can they use it to develop a better plan for a hypothetical business. Similarly, eportfolios can also be used to evaluate student work and learning in non-school contexts. For example, if a student participated in an internship or completed a project under the guidance of an expert mentor from the community, students could create portfolios over the course of these learning activities and submit them as evidence they have met certain learning expectations or graduation requirements.

  • Portfolios can encourage students to take more ownership and responsibility over the learning process. ePortfolios are a way for students to critique and evaluate their own work and academic progress, often during the process of deciding what will be included in their portfolios. Because portfolios document learning growth over time, they can help students reflect on where they started a course, how they developed, and where they ended up at the conclusion of the course. When reviewing a portfolio, instructors may also ask students to articulate the connection between particular work products and the academic expectations and goals for a course. For these reasons, advocates of portfolios often recommend that students be involved in determining what goes into a portfolio, and that instructors should not unilaterally make the decisions without involving students.

Debate

While portfolios are not generally controversial in concept, it’s possible that skepticism, criticism, and debate may arise if portfolios are viewed as burdensome, add-on requirements rather than as a vital instructional strategy and assessment option. Portfolios may also be viewed negatively if they are poorly designed and executed, if they tend to be filed away and forgotten, if they are not actively maintained by students, if they are not meaningfully integrated into the academic program, if educators do not use them to inform and adjust their instructional techniques, or if sufficient time is not provided to review and discuss them. In short, how portfolios are actually used or not used, and whether they produce the desired educational results, will likely determine how they are perceived.

Creating, maintaining, and assessing student portfolios can also be a time-consuming endeavor. For this reason and others, some critics may contend that portfolios are not a practical or feasible option for use in large-scale evaluations of student performance. Exams, in contrast, are relatively efficient and inexpensive to score, and test results are considered more reliable or comparable across students, given that there is less chance that error, bias, or inconsistency may occur during the scoring process. ePortfolios are a comparably time-consuming assessment strategy because they require human scorers, and it is also far more challenging to maintain consistent and reliable evaluations or student achievement. Many advocates would argue, however, that eportfolios are not intended for use in large-scale evaluations student performance, and that they provide the greatest educational value at the classroom level where instructors have personal relationships and conversations with students, and where in-depth feedback from instructors can help students grow, improve, and mature as learners.

Attribution

Portions of this work are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is attributed to Great Schools Partnership, and the original version can be found at here.