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The Principled
Portfolio:
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The Principled Portfolio (I) (PPI) module concluded with our questions that I hope you have been pondering the past month, and that I intend to address in this module:
1. How do we know what students have learned?
2. What counts as evidence of learning?
3. How might we document both growth and achievement in student learning?
4. How might we communicate growth and achievement in student learning to external stakeholders?
We all know the inadequacy of course transcripts to provide authentic evidence of student learning. At best, they point to patterns of consistency and achievement, but they cannot show us what students have actually learned.
Student electronic portfolios have the capacity to do just that, ranging from the level of the individual student to departments, programs, and campus-wide. Let’s look at the IUPUI ePort introduced in PPI to see how it works at the individual level to track improvement and achievement in student learning. At the core of the IUPUI ePort is the learning matrix (http://portfolio.iu.edu/jfern/eport/article/matrix.gif). This one-screen matrix tracks student learning from first year to graduating senior in all of the IUPUI Principles of Undergraduate Learning (PULs)(see PPI)as they are demonstrated in their discipline-specific coursework. Across the top of the matrix, you will see levels corresponding to students first, second, and senior years, as well as a level called “experiential,” which refers to co-curricular and extra-curricular learning. Inside each cell, you will see icons which, when clicked upon, will open to the actual student work (will not happen in this demo matrix). You will also see colored backgrounds for each cell, indicating whether students have completed the cell (blue), have begun working on it (yellow), are able to begin working on it (green), or are not able to begin working on it because they have yet to complete the same knowledge ability at an earlier level (red).
To complete these cells, students upload artifacts already graded by their professors as evidence of learning. The grades given by the professors may be made known, but not necessarily. When they have sufficient artifacts (this could range from 1-5 per cell) to demonstrate what faculty have agreed upon as expectations for each PUL at each level, they write a reflection. In this reflection, they will be prompted to make the case that their artifacts, taken together, meet campus expectations.
Completed cells are then sent to an ePort responder, who may be a faculty member involved in one of the Communities of Practice based on the PULs, or a member of the Senior Academy (retired faculty wanting to remain engaged with student learning), or even an alumnus of the university, wanting to remain engaged with the university. These responders have two tasks:
1. Make a judgment, upon reading the cell, that the work (I) MEETS,(II)EXCEEDS, or (III)DOES NOT MEET campus expectations for that particular PUL.
2. Select one or more pre-written motivational and instructional responses, which they may modify, back to the student to help them improve their reflective writing and to motivate them to keep working on their ePorts.
The results of the evaluations in task 1 are aggregated according to several demographic factors, including department, major, gender, and so on, and are available to administrators (chairs and deans) while keeping the identities of individual students anonymous. Similarly, the choices of responses are also aggregated, so that we can track the development of students’ ability to write effective reflections on their learning.
Additionally, the aggregated results will show up on iPort (the IUPUI institutional portfolio) so that any visitors to the IUPUI website will have access to this information. External stakeholders will also be able to view selected individual student portfolios (by students who volunteer) and watch the course of their development on a “Watch My Portfolio Grow” link to the iPort. In this way, the IUPUI portfolios work together to make public both aggregated and individual portraits of student learning.
By involving a range of responders within and beyond the university, we hope to make learning a truly community effort.
As the work described in this module is still in development, my questions for you are formed to help us move further, even as we hope that our work will help some of you move further with electronic student portfolios:
- Can you envision something like this working on your campus? Why or why not?
- What do you think of engaging retired faculty and alumni in assessing student learning?
- How do you envision this kind of information being used to improve curricula and pedagogy?
- What problems or limitations or challenges do you see?
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