Digital Portfolio Assessment

Sample Digital Portfolio Organization -Comp II

FYW- Digital Portfolios

All composition students submit a course portfolio at the end of each semester. At minimum, these portfolios should contain a 750-1000 word reflection statement on their writing and revision process, as well as drafts of their major papers. Instructors may choose to require other documents in the portfolio at their discretion.

We recommend that students keep all of their work for composition courses on their Google Drive in clearly-labeled files. Instructors are free to use other platforms for portfolio creation. Instructors may also want to keep backups of student work on their own cloud storage networks. Here is a list of documents that the portfolio should contain:

Reflection statement or argument. (See below.)
Rough drafts, revised drafts, and final polished drafts. These should be uploaded as files, not pasted into the website itself.
Assignment guidelines for each project, uploaded as separate files.
Peer review documents (memos, documents with instructor comments, etc).

Using Google Sites- Overview and Tutorial

The Reflection Statement and/or Argument

Reflection refers to a metacognitive process that we engage in when we want to look back at some activity or decision we've made, to think about what we've learned from it, and how we might use it in the future. Reflection is a powerful tool in teaching and learning -- think of it as a dot-connecting mechanism -- and outside of academics, reflecting is a common tool among professionals and organizations as a way to establish values, goals, and future actions:

• What did I do? (looking Back)

• How is it significant?

• When have I done this kind of work before? Where could I use this again?

• Do I see any patterns or relationships in what I did? (what's happening now, Present)

• How well did I do? What worked? What do I need to improve?

• What should I do next? What's my plan? (looking forward, Future)

Centering Reflective Practices in FYW

Some instructors may ask students to include a short reflection statement for each major paper, or they may want students to compose a single essay that reflects on their work over the course of the semester. Either way, the reflection component should follow these criteria:

It should reference key concepts from the course objectives and WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0. For example: rhetorical knowledge, genre awareness, following conventions, process, critical thinking, information literacy, modality, etc.
It should provide clear statements about how the student revised their papers based on feedback from their peers and instructors. It should also describe any Writing Center visits, or other activities that helped them draft and revise these papers.
It should provide specific examples of how they revised per instructor and peer feedback, with evidence from their own papers in the form of direct and indirect citations.
It should especially reflect on research skills (broadly defined) that they developed and deployed during at least one assignment. Familiarity with library search tools plays a key role here.
It should explain and justify their revisions and composing choices, including any feedback they did not understand or agree with.
It should describe the process of composing the portfolio itself, including design choices regarding layout, file arrangement, font, color, use of hyperlinks, choice of platform (Google Sites, Weebly, Wix, WordPress, etc).

Students are not required to use any particular platform for their portfolios. However, they need to try different ones and be able to explain their choices. Instructors should do their best to help students explore and understand the affordances and constraints of these different platforms, including privacy issues. For example, a major advantage of Google Sites is that it allows students to share their portfolios only with UALR faculty and staff.

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