Why Assess with Portfolios?

Why does portfolio grading work? How can it be practiced most effectively, producing the best outcomes for students? I’ve been committed to portfolio grading for many years, deferring all grading till I receive a portfolio—at midterm and again at the end of the semester. Now I am questioning elements of my practice because of generational changes. Today’s students are used to frequent evaluation. How can I reconcile their need to know how they’re doing with the pedagogical benefits I see in deferred grading?

As I have practiced portfolio grading, the portfolio receives a single grade that is an overall assessment of quality + effort. Before grading the portfolio, I have offered plenty of feedback on individual papers, and I’ve implemented self-assessment and peer assessment, along with lots of instruction in what makes writing good.

The rationale for this combination of instruction, peer and instructor feedback, and self-assessment is my belief that students who understand what makes writing good and who participate in assessing their own writing will not get any surprises when they receive the portfolio grade, that they will have realistic expectations of what the grade will be when they hand in the portfolio. They know what is expected of them as writers and they know how well they have achieved the level of expectation. Usually, they know whether they have invested sufficient effort to receive a high grade, and they know how their writing quality compares to the quality of their peers’ writing.

One of the major justifications of this approach is that it keeps students working on their writing right up to the point when the assessment instrument, the portfolio, is turned over for the grade: good students kept working on their writing to make it better, poor students kept working because they were not discouraged by low grades on early efforts, and most students felt less pressure because they had the whole semester to produce that final body of work.

My standards have been reasonably high—that is, simultaneously high and attainable, especially with the revising in response to my copious feedback on individual papers. My goal in giving lots of feedback and requiring lots of revising was to get students to internalize the revising voice—which at first was mine, and later would become part of their own writing knowledge. I was pleased a decade ago when a student told me, “All the time I was drafting, I kept hearing your voice saying, ‘More evidence, more evidence,’ and I put it in.” The student who hears that voice can look at other papers he’s written, as he’s preparing his final portfolio and can see the places where he might put more evidence into them—so that the effort he makes in putting together his final portfolio will result in his receiving a higher grade than he would have received as an average of grades given on each paper as submitted throughout the semester. Perhaps the most important lessons for students from portfolio grading are that writing is never really finished—we just meet deadlines with the best work we can assemble at that point—and that the overall quality of our education in any area may be better represented by the presentation of our best work than by a statistical average of the work turned in at various points during it—because we can slog away at a task over time and then have an epiphany that transforms our insight.

I have long believed that many students reached significant insight and improvement about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through the semester, when the repetition of specific messages in the feedback they received reached a sort of critical mass, enabling them to significantly revise papers for the final portfolio—rather than insight’s coming in regular increments with each paper they wrote.

My dilemma now, in light of the way our students come to us now, expecting frequent evaluation and reassurance is: How can I preserve the advantages of my past practices with portfolios while providing students with the ongoing assessment they need in order to recognize that they are learning something and making progress in my class? This is especially challenging when I teach so many first-semester college students, who come to my classes with high school standards and expectations and little experience in taking charge of their education.