Findings

Reflection

What is the purpose of reflection?

According to the Chinese philosopher Confucius, "Learning without reflection is a waste. Reflection without learning is dangerous." Every experience gives people the opportunity to consider what went well and what could be better. The purpose of reflection is to understand, learn, and improve. Self-reflection is critical for growth. Reflective practice enables individuals to review and improve their own practice, a necessary step in becoming an effective self-directed learners (Davies, 2012) Reflection requires an individual to be metacognitive. Cognitive psychologists use the term metacognition to describe our ability to assess our own skills, knowledge, or learning (Lang, 2012). That ability affects how well and how long students study—which, of course, affects how much and how deeply they learn. In Embracing Reflective Practice, Davies lists the following benefits of reflective practice:

• Increases learning from an experience or situation
• Promotes deep rather than superficial learning
• Identifies personal and professional strengths and weaknesses
• Identifies educational needs
• Results in the acquisition of new knowledge and skills
• Facilitates practitioners to understand their own beliefs, attitudes and values
• Encourages self-motivated and self-directed learning
• Acts as a source of feedback
• Improves personal and clinical confidence (2012, p. 10).

Studies on metacognition, or knowing about knowing, and scholarship in self-regulated learning, suggest that self-reflection plays an important role in academic achievement and performance (O'Connor, 2014). In the school setting, reflection gives students an opportunity to assess their own understanding. As they conceptualize the knowledge or skill, they can use their metacognitive skills to determine their needs. Fostering a culture of reflection will create a rich learning environment.

How do digital portfolios help students reflect on their learning in meaningful ways?

One way to encourage reflection and metacognition is through the development of an ePortfolio (O'Connor, 2014). Digital portfolios make thinking visible. If students are to truly reflect on their learning, there needs to be a place to document the reflection. Collecting and capturing learning digitally is a manageable way to integrate metacognitive learning and written reflections into assignments to make them the most meaningful to students (O'Connor, 2014). Garthwait and Verrill explained, "A primary purpose of any type of portfolio assessment is to teach students how to evaluate their own work via application of quality standards and personal goals. With e-portfolios, the main idea is to keep students focused on learning rather than on individual projects or products--e-portfolios are part of the learning process, not a result of it" (2003, p. 23) The portfolio does not need to be a showcase of polished work, rather it can show the learning that occurs over time. The digital format allows reflection to evolve beyond the written paragraph. Students can use photos, videos, drawings, and audio recordings to communicate their thoughts. Using digital portfolio tools is an effective way to teach students to think critically about the products of their learning and the development of their skill set. Thanks to research from leaders like John Hattie, we know that it is also an effective method of increasing student outcomes (Besse, 2017).

Interaction

How can digital portfolios provide a means for meaningful feedback?

Providing feedback is an effective way to help students learn from their work. Feedback should come from a variety of sources. Teachers, staff and peers can provide student feedback. Family members should also be able to provide feedback. Digital portfolios make this easy and allow family members to comment in timely matters. No longer do students have to wait until conferences to hear their parents thoughts on their work. Instead digital portfolio programs immediately send notifications to family members allowing them to provide feedback using any electronic devices. One of the claims made for virtual learning environments and learning platforms is the capacity for both collaboration in social learning and feedback, an evaluative activity that can support assessment for learning. This can involve students, teachers, parents and experts within and across institutions (Hartnell-Young, E. et al, 2007). E-Portfolios: Documenting Student Success explained one way to use e-portfolios effectively is through the use of mind maps. Students can create a map explaining their existing knowledge. The teacher can then use the mind map to document misconceptions and take note of intriguing questions that might help guide their learning. At the end of a unit, these webs can be reviewed and edited based on new knowledge acquired (Tolsby, 2001, p.27). In this sense, the portfolios would be used to help provide feedback to the teacher to help guide instruction.

In what ways do digital portfolios make students more accountable for their work?

One of the benefits of digital portfolios is they help make students more accountable for their work. Individual portfolios are a collection of their work which is on display for an authentic audience. According to Digital portfolios: fact or fashion? Digital portfolios helped make students more aware of their beliefs and their learning, but it did present some challenges because “the challenge of having to present their ideas in a digital portfolio influenced the decisions they made about how to represent themselves to an audience. The flexibility of the presentation methods and the opportunities to embed interactive elements into their portfolio led the students to explore new ways of representing themselves. The unique opportunities that the digital portfolios offered the students lay in this freedom of choice and the flexibility of the authoring tools used” (Woodward & Nanlohy, 2010, p. 234). This is an aspect of creating a digital portfolio that is important to consider because it is different from creating a paper artifact. There is more choice when working with technology in terms of creating. A more focused awareness must also be placed on providing feedback in this medium. A real world example of the accountability students learn through digital portfolios comes from student led conferences in a third grade class. During the conferences, the teacher noticed that his “students glowed with pride as they displayed their work and talked about the strengths and weaknesses of each of their chosen projects. Parents listened intently and asked probing questions” (Garthwait, 2003, p.25). The teacher continued to explain that the use of technology had an impact on their learning as well as the communication of their success (p. 25). The ability to help students from a young age understand the concepts of accountability and pride in their work is a powerful lesson and a lesson that will have lasting effects as they continue to grow.

How are collaboration and communication skills enhanced through the use of digital portfolios?

Another benefit of digital portfolios in terms of interactions is they provide the means for collaboration and communication to occur between students, teachers and parents. With technology expanding, they are powerful tools to be used to strengthen these relationships. Based on an article from teachthought called 5 Reasons To Use Digital Portfolios In Your Classroom, parents are having more difficulty finding the time to get into the classroom, so digital portfolios is one way to increase accessibility. Parents can receive notifications when their student has updated their portfolio allowing their parents to immediately see their progress. This could change the after school conversations between students and parents. Instead of simply asking, “How was your day today?” parents can use the updates to ask more specific questions to better understand the artifacts they are seeing in the portfolio. Another benefit of digital portfolios also mentioned in the article is that digital portfolios can help with communication skills. The author wrote, One of the 7 survival skills of the 21st century focuses on effective oral and written communication. Digital portfolios can help engage students in practicing these important abilities” (Nichols). This will help set students up for successful educations and careers. Furthermore, according to E-Portfolios: Documenting Student Success, which documented the results of using e-portfolios in a third grade classroom, there were many success stories to emphasize the impact e-portfolios made in school and home collaboration. For example, the students collaboratively made a book about seasons. Without the use of e-portfolios, the finished book would have remained in the classroom or school library, but they were able to more widely distribute the book by scanning each page and including it in the e-portfolio (Tolsby, 2001, p. 26). Another success story was about a father who lived hundreds of kilometers away from his son. Being able to access the e-portfolio (through CD in this case) was thrilling for this father and opened up lines of communication with his son (p. 27).

Assessment

What is the purpose of assessment?

Assessment is often viewed as the process of evaluating student performance and providing feedback in the form of a grade, in order for the student to recognize the value of their work. A student takes a test, a teacher assesses the test by marking correct or incorrect answers, and the student receives a grade. This practice is outdated and ineffective. Elliot W. Eisner, late professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, addressed the need to rethink how student learning is assessed.. “If there ever was a time in which the calls were clearer or more strident for new, more authentic approaches to educational assessment, I cannot remember when they occurred. Yet, despite its salience, the term assessment is more an aspiration than a concept that has a socially confirmed technical meaning. The older term, evaluation, while not particularly ancient in the literature of US education, is no longer as popular as it once was; assessment has given it a gentle, but firm nudge” (Eisner, 1993).

He attempts to redefine what assessment is, and what it should look like in 21st century schools. “Assessment (the new term) needed to be more generous, more complex, more closely aligned with life than with individual performance measured in an antiseptic context using sanitised instruments that were untouched by human hands” (Eisner, 1998). When we speak of assessment, we must define it as the process of documenting, monitoring, and giving value to a student’s learning.

Slowly, people are beginning to see the value of this shift in thinking, and schools are changing the way they assess. One key difference in the way learning is assessed lies in the role of the student. Self-assessment is proven to have great impact on learning. David J. Nicol compares different models of assessment and feedback, and finds it most effective when “students are assumed to occupy a central and active role in all feedback processes. They are always actively involved in monitoring and regulating their own performance, both in relation to desired goals and in terms of the strategies used to reach these goals.” (Nicol, 2006, p.4) If we are to promote life long learning, then self-assessment is essential, as are the skills that are associated with such reflection. “Teachers should focus much more effort on strengthening the skills of self‐assessment in their students” (p.4).

How can a digital portfolio be used as an effective assessment tool?

A digital portfolio can be an incredibly effective assessment tool when utilized with careful and thoughtful practice. First, a digital portfolio gives the opportunity to focus on process (over, or in addition to product), a key element that is so often lost with traditional assessment methods. A student can document with photos, videos, or written journal entries while the learning is taking place, or even in the face of frustration, which can provide a more accurate and authentic picture of growth. This allows students to tell the story of their learning, not just show the end results. “A portfolio is a purposeful collection of student work that tells the story of the student’s efforts, progress, or achievement in given areas. Such purposeful collections include student participation in selecting the contents of the portfolio, increased ownership in the process by helping to develop guidelines for selection, establishment of criteria for judging merit, and evidence of self-reflection” (Crowe, 1998, p.74). Rather than looking at cumulative tests results, or a presentation at the end of a project, digital portfolios allow students to gather evidence of their learning along the way, thus making the process more transparent. “Portfolios provide a natural and effective means of ‘intelligence-fair’ performance based- assessment. Portfolio assessment meets the definition of ‘performance-based’ by allowing the learner to display a variety of evidence of performance, such as products or exhibitions” (p.74).

Digital portfolios also allow students to put self-assessment into practice. Not only is their work centrally collected for review, but the technology of today allows them to comment directly on each item of evidence. The benefits of this practice stretch beyond the academics. Nic Rate of Efellows has researched and seen the effects first hand. He writes, “If learners are constantly asking themselves as Absolum writes, “What does this information tell me about how well I’ve learnt and what I need to do to close the gap?” the outcomes of self-assessments can be far reaching and not just academic. Clarke et al. describe, increased self-esteem, enjoyment in finding others with the same problems or successes, and liberation as the students share difficulties they are experiencing as some of the positive outcomes of self assessment especially when undertaken as part of a whole-class sharing session” (Rate, 2008, p.14).

Lastly, digital portfolios allow for assessments to be consistently documented and monitored over time. An elementary student’s decoding abilities can be assessed with video from kindergarten through third grade. A high school student’s understanding of themes in literature can be assessed by a range of audio reading responses from freshman to senior year. Hakon Tolsby, a researcher at Aalborg University in Denmark, argues that, “By combining the samples, it is possible to document a wider range of student abilities and also to show progression over time through a comparison of samples from different time-periods. This has been found to give a more meaningful assessment than traditional one-time, objective-based test assessment” (Tolsby, 2001, p.3).

Be mindful that the tool itself cannot achieve accurate and meaningful assessment. The processes and ways in which teachers and students interact with the digital portfolios are equally as important as the tool itself. Regular updating and consistent reviewing are essential; it cannot be a stagnant collection of items.