The Benefits and Challenges of Portfolio-Style Assessment
Benefits
Assessment through the use of portfolios offers a more authentic evaluation of a student's real-world professional capabilities. This method enables learners to showcase the integration of their learning across a wide range of personal, professional and academic skills, both inside and outside the programme. Portfolios also provide an opportunity for learners to reflect on their progress throughout their studies, providing a more holistic view of their coursework and activities.
The process of preparing a portfolio provides students with practical experience in documenting and professionally presenting their achievements. This also encourages self-reflection and the development of autonomous learning skills, shifting responsibility from the teacher to the learner.
Using portfolios in assessment promotes integrated course design and evaluation across a programme of study (Klenowski et al., 2006; O'Sullivan et al., n.d.). Portfolios offer a progressive and coherent representation of a learner's knowledge, performance and growth at specific points throughout the course or programme.
Students may view portfolios as a fairer form of assessment compared to other methods. This is due to the requirement of sustained effort over an extended period, the recognition of learning and development processes through revision and self-reflection, and the ability to provide an overall view of the student's learning journey.
Finally, portfolios, being a more personalised form of assessment, carry a lower risk of plagiarism. The teacher can synchronously track a student’s progress in a process portfolio and elements of the process can authenticate the product – as can the inclusion of a variety of media, such as photographs and recordings.
Challenges
One challenge of using student portfolios is finding the right balance between clarifying requirements and allowing for creativity. To maximise learning benefits while minimising workload for students, care must be taken when defining the scope of the portfolio.
Grading student portfolios can also be a significant challenge
This is particularly true when the portfolio is used to support integrative learning across multiple courses or an entire programme of study (such as an interdisciplinary unit). This requires collaborative grading, which can be time-consuming.
Another challenge is the difficulty in grading portfolios reliably. Since portfolios are individual expressions of a student's work and achievements, interpreting them requires a higher degree of assessment expertise and understanding of the assessment criteria.
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