Assessment by portfolio: an experiment

In 1994, I was on sabbatical leave in Canada. I returned to Hong Kong very impressed with the use of ‘authentic’ assessment and assessment portfolios in Canadian elementary schools. Authentic assessment means that students are given assessment tasks that mimic real life; they then selected their best work to place in portfolios for their teachers to assess. It seems very simple, but the implications are profound. It seemed to me to be ideal for the sort of courses I was teaching in professional education. I was retiring from university teaching the following year, so it was now or never if I wanted to try this method of assessing students.

A splendid metaphor for assessment by portfolio was given to me by one of my part-time students:

When I stand in front of a class, I don’t see stupid or unteachable learners, but boxes of treasures waiting for us to open! Cheung Chi Ming, a P. C. Ed. student.

This prompted me to envisage the following exchange:

Teacher: How many diamonds have you got?

Student: I don t have any diamonds. '

Teacher: Then you fail!

Student: But you didn’t ask me about my pearls, my jade or my amethysts!

Asking pre-set questions with pre-determined answers is shooting fish in muddy water. If we want to know the value of what our students have acquired, we have to ask them to show us all their treasures, not just the diamonds we happen to think of.

My students were teachers enrolled in a part-time B. Ed. program, the unit in question about how knowledge of psychology could improve teaching. During the day, they had plenty of opportunity to see how psychology might be doing that. They were the ones to tell me if it had, and how it had, not for me to tell them how it should have helped and then for me to assess them on how well they remembered what I’d told them. The following is not atypical of traditional assessment:

I hate to say it, but what you have got to do is to have a list of facts; you write down the important ' ' points and memorize those, then you ll do all right in the test ... If you can give a bit of factual – information so and so did that, and concluded that for two sides of writing, then you'll get a good mark.  A psychology undergraduate, quoted in Ramsden (1984; p. 144)

A common enough assessment task, but it sends students entirely the wrong message about what it means to understand and apply psychology. Unfortunately, it is one that students are used to and have learned how to handle. My B. Ed. students were not surprisingly deeply threatened when asked to show me their gemstones of how psychology had improved their teaching.

This is what one wrote at the beginning:

How am I supposed to do it well when I'm not sure exactly what the professor wants to see in it?... though he did say that we can put what means much to us in the portfolio, yet how can I be sure that he agrees with me?

I suggested what kinds of thing they might place in their portfolios, and that they keep a reflective diary, writing in it anything that might indicate how their teaching had been improved, such as samples of conversations with their own students, lesson plans, samples of student work. After a trial run, they got the idea. When they finally submitted their portfolios, I was stunned. They were rich and exciting, the results, in terms of As and Bs awarded, better than ever before; the feedback the best I’d received from a class.

Here are a couple of excerpts from their diaries:

All (the teacher) said was show me the evidence of your learning that has taken place and we ' ' have to ponder, reflect and project the theories we have learnt into our own teaching... If it had only been an exam or an essay, we would have probably just repeated his ideas to him and continued to teach the same way as we always do!

Instead of bombing us with lengthy lectures and lecture notes, we have to reflect on our own learning experiences and to respond critically ...I feel quite excited as this course is gradually leading me to do something positive to my teaching career and to experience real growth.

What had happened? It was the backwash effect, to use Lewis Eltons term (1987; p. 92). It was exactly what Ramsden had observed, only this time it was working positively.

The idea is so simple. We all know that students see the assessment tasks as the curriculum. Well then, just make sure that the curriculum—what we really want the students to learn—is contained in the assessment tasks. Driving instructors do it. A driving instructor wants the student to learn how to drive a car, the teaching method is driving a car, the assessment is how well the car is driven. We’d think a driving instructor who only lectured on driving, then gave a multiple-choice test at the end, to be grossly irresponsible. Yet many teachers in many universities are doing the equivalent of just that most of the time.

Why? What has happened to legitimize this situation?

مواضيع ذات صلة

The SOLO taxonomy The theoretical background of the SOLO taxonomy

Views on the Adoption and Implementation of the SOLO Taxonomy Introduction

Constructive alignment

The standards model of assessment

The measurement model of student assessment

Assessment

Teaching and learning activities Monitoring and assessment