Kathleen yancey invited us to reflect on what we notice as we look at the portfolio explosion that has gained steady strength since we started our experiment in 1983 at Stony Brook.

First, we note that we are not assessment specialists. We have not mastered the technical dimensions of psychometrics. That doesn’t mean we don’t respect the field; we agree with Ed White that one of the greatest needs is for practitioners and theorists like us to talk to psychometricians. But we don’t feel comfortable doing that so long as they continue to worship numbers as the bottom line. We...

In the upper bedroom of his house on mickle street in camden, new Jersey, Walt Whitman wrote a literary retrospective in 1888 entitled “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads.” Looking back at his life as a writer, Whitman proposes this theory of literary interpretation:

Also it must be carefully remember’d that first class literature does not shine by any luminosity of its own; nor do its poems. They grow of circumstances, and are evolutionary. The actual living light is always curiously from elsewhere—follows unaccountable sources, and is lunar and relative at the best….

Just as all the old imaginative...

Issues in writing assessment have traditionally revolved around our ability to construct procedures that represent the ways students write and at the same adhere to the guidelines set down by theories of educational measurement. Moss asserts that this tension between theoretical constraints of literacy education and assessment has been productive in promoting the many new and improved methods for assessing student writing (see Camp 1993a for a discussion of the relationship between the teaching and testing communities in creating writing assessment procedures). Moss also warns, however, that “Proposed solutions often reflect compromises between competing criteria rather than the fundamental rethinking...

As their use becomes more widespread, portfolios are being asked to function in a variety of ways. In exploring how portfolio design may encourage multiple purposes, though, some of us have begun to suspect that not all purposes are compatible. This suspicion can be seen in the growing tension between those who believe portfolios function best as a highly personalized pedagogy kept deliberately separate from formal assessment and grading and those who see portfolios as a desirable vehicle for assessing individual proficiency. As these two factions have begun eyeing each other with increasing puzzlement and dismay, however, a third perspective...

Teachers have probably always understood the meaning of the phrase “teach to the test.” Evidence confirms this, showing that teachers will base instruction on the content and form of tests, especially when high stakes are attached (Corbett and Wilson 1991; Madaus 1988; and M. L. Smith 1991). Now educational reformers want to make use of this tendency by linking “tests” to portfolios. By setting high standards and developing new forms of assessment more closely aligned with current views of learning and good teaching practice, the reasoning goes, we can transform education. Portfolios, especially, seem to provide the ideal recipe for...

Our formal introduction to portfolios began during the 1992 to 1993 school year when we were invited to participate on a district portfolio training committee. The committee provided us with the opportunity to train and collaborate with other teachers and administrators who were interested in integrating portfolios into their classrooms or schools. In addition to receiving books and materials on portfolios, our participation on the committee enabled us to attend conferences both in and out of state. In return, our district leader asked only that we do our best to implement what we were learning in our own classes and,...

The emphasis on performance assessment has encouraged educators to seek ways to actively involve students in authentic activities which are challenging and interesting. As an English language arts consultant working to help classroom teachers bridge the gap between theory and practice, I know that performance assessment should also model and support good instruction. Without a doubt, writing portfolios in the classroom have this potential. Is it also possible for such potential to be supported through large-scale portfolio assessment? I believe that it is.

Portfolios provide a forum of understanding for both learners and teachers. This occurs for the learner, when,...

The increasing use of portfolios for evaluation and assessment embraces all levels of education today, including the relatively unexplored territory of considering portfolios as equivalent to doctoral candidacy exams in English. Current literature continues to expand the portfolio dialogue (Belanoff and Elbow 1991; Elbow and Belanoff 1991; Yancey 1992a, 1992b; Graves 1992; Gallehr 1993), including an entire conference on portfolios at Miami University of Ohio in October 1992, where the issue of graduate candidacy portfolios was initially raised, and the 1994 series of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) portfolio conferences, where in a panel discussion I reported on...

I started my teaching career twenty-four years ago by furnishing a large corner of my classroom with a couch and a rug made of carpet remnants. There my eighth graders lounged, upright or prone, while I fed them books and blank pages for their writing. The arrangement did little justice to the student-centered curriculum of James Moffett and B.J. Wagner which was, at the time, in serious contention with the one-lecture-fits-all approach, supported by desks in a row. If anything, couches and carpets were proof that ambiance is overrated.

On the other hand, students spend thirteen or more years in...

Portfolios for young children should be a powerful instrument for assessing and nurturing early literacy development for both the child and the teacher. However, if a teacher does not understand the developmental process of children’s early literacy, the instrument remains monodimensional and flat, rather than interactive and dynamic (Stone 1995).

When something is interactive, there is a link between key elements so each affects the other; when it is dynamic, it possesses a power or force that produces change. Within an early literacy portfolio, the elements of interaction for the teacher and child are the knowledge of early literacy development,...

Like many literacy educators, i am an advocate and user of portfolios. I use portfolios in all the classes that I teach: an undergraduate English course on young adult literature, a methods course for prospective secondary English educators, and a graduate seminar on English education. My approach to portfolios is slightly different in each of these classes. In my undergraduate literature course, students choose two writing projects to develop and then share with me the evolution of their work in the form of a final portfolio. In my methods course, students work collaboratively using computers to produce an electronic portfolio...

Every belief i had ever held about education was challenged during the summer of 1991 as I learned about project-based instruction with a group of approximately twenty-five other educators in a month-long session sponsored by the school district where I worked. We studied and debated the educational implications of documents prepared by local businesses showing math, reading, and writing skills needed for employees to be successful in various occupations. Another document with a business focus, What Work Requires of School, from the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills confirmed the need for major changes in education. We also looked at...

One of the first lessons we learn when dealing with any kind of assessment is that context is indeed everything. If we fail to understand the context for the assessment, then we cannot know the questions the assessment is to answer; we cannot collect appropriate samples, define appropriate criteria, set appropriate objectives, nor know whether we have achieved them. In short, without a full understanding of context, we leave ourselves open to just the kind of disaster Jesse Jackson mentions: instead of accomplishing a skilled act that does good, we end up hacking the “patient” apart, leaving it worse off...

In my writing workshops with first year law students, i often give them a completely inscrutable piece of writing and ask them to comment on it. The single paragraph of approximately 200 words is full of legal jargon, unnecessarily long sentences, Latin phrases, and pretentious diction. I always hope to hear the blunt response, “This person needs to write in plain English.” Instead, the students approach the text warily, making timid jabs at its obscurity. “It could be organized better,” one student suggests. “It needs a topic sentence,” another adds cautiously. They seem to be so accustomed to reading prose...

One of the tenets to have emerged in the burgeoning literature on portfolios is the importance of self-evaluation. Linda Rief writes that portfolios offer “possibilities in diversity, depth, growth, and self-evaluation” (Rief 1990, 26). She asserts that when her seventh grade students used portfolios, “[t]hey thoughtfully and honestly evaluated their own learning with fat more detail and introspection than I thought possible” (Rief 1990, 26). Others have made similar claims for portfolio use in their writing classrooms (see Belanoff and Dickson 1991; Yancey 1992b). Dennie Wolf writes that “portfolios can promote a climate of reflection” (Wolf 1989, 37). This potential...

I have taught english “methods” courses for over a decade now: the courses that are intended to help students learn enough about the teaching of English so they can walk into a middle or high school classroom populated with live students and not panic at the sight. As a former public school teacher who herself took such a course, I know both what that course did for me and—as important—what it didn’t. What my English methods course equipped me to do was to teach suburban white students, mostly males, preparing to attend Harvard. This preparation proved only minimally...

The portfolio has typically been viewed either as a pedagogical strategy or an assessment tool. As a pedagogical strategy, the portfolio grounds the notion of the student’s personal process and provides a framework for the display of both process and product. As an authentic assessment tool, the portfolio assesses students’ multiple abilities under the ideal of mastery learning; in this capacity it has been used to place students in academic programs, to determine whether they were ready to leave those programs and/or levels, and incidentally to award them grades or at least indications of progress. The portfolio can also, as...

A teacher joined several friends waiting for class to begin. on her way over from school to campus she had squeezed in some grocery shopping. “There I was, halfway down my list, when I realized that my portfolio was on the car seat. I left my cart in the middle of the aisle and ran out to the parking lot. What a relief! I had remembered to lock the doors.” She seemed surprised by the intensity of her concern for her portfolio. The others were amused but empathetic. After all, they, too, were making portfolios, and their journals revealed similar...

I regularly teach a practicum for new teachers of writing, most of whom are first year graduate students and teaching assistants with little or no prior teaching experience of any kind. For these new teachers, many of whom were undergraduates only a few months earlier and are often only a few years older than their students, a major concern is their authority in the classroom. They are worried about whether they know enough to teach, whether their students will accept them as teachers, whether they will be able to handle any problems which might occur, and whether they will be...

Writing portfolios and computers comprise two of the more recent teaching technologies introduced into late twentieth century English classes. In a relatively short time, these two technologies have spread to English classes at all levels and appear increasingly in the field’s professional discussions. Not surprisingly, discussions of both technologies—in journals and other professional publications—are usually upbeat, heralding the innovations as revolutionary with the promise to improve dramatically students’ learning and writing. Not surprisingly, each technology is seen also as a positive influence that will promote a social construction of knowledge in which teachers and students are all learners-in-progress,...

The goal was to produce a student-authored electronic hypertext about issues of diversity at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) and to assess the course work by means of portfolios. The products included over one hundred and twenty linked screens of information, nine 100-page plus course portfolios, four one-hour long videotaped oral presentations, and three grades of “incomplete.” The process entailed small group development of discrete electronic documents that were subsequently linked into a large common document. It was an ambitious and arduous task for many of the students. And yet the outcomes of this curricular experiment, as...

I was never quite sure why i identified my colleague, bob, from the computer science department with the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Sure, he often had his hands in a computer’s innards just as his alloy counterpart seemed condemned to live inside that metal body. But Bob’s head did not come to a point, he was certainly far from rusty when it came to teaching computer science, and this gentle professor was not lacking in heart. This identification only became clear when I received the notice from the academic dean announcing, “Professor Robert Adams will be available...

With the shift from product to process approaches in teaching writing has come the shift from indirect to direct procedures in evaluating writing quality. As a result, portfolios have become a widely accepted evaluation method which focuses on process over product, often assessing the development of written proficiency over time. Within classroom contexts, the form and function of portfolios are generally determined by teachers or administrators hoping to assess the written proficiency of students through the evaluation of academic essays. While students may have control over which essays go into their portfolios, their control over the form and purpose of...

“Portnet” is a group of postsecondary portfolio teacher-researchers across the country who exchange, evaluate, and discuss each other’s portfolios. It began in October 1992 at Miami University’s “New Directions in Portfolios” conference, as a way of examining an argument against portfolio assessment: that since there is no “normed” or standardized portfolio, portfolio programs are too local and thus too individualized. While they are interesting classroom pedagogy, portfolios lack the validity—but more particularly the reliability—needed for assessment purposes. At the Miami conference, Michael Allen asked several participants if they would send five to ten portfolios to be read by...