What's in Your Portfolio?
Did you ever see those Capital One commercials where a band of marauders advances on an innocent customer as he makes a purchase with his credit card? The marauders are stopped just before they strike when they realize that this guy was smart enough to choose a credit card that didn't have ridiculous interest rates. The slogan "What's in your wallet?" begs the watcher to make an either/or decision to get slaughtered by the marauders, or to go with their low interest card.
As I read Trent Batson's Campus Technology article, The ePortfolio Hijacked, I thought of hordes of accreditors descending on innocent students, ready to take control of their portfolios and destroy their opportunities to recast themselves as educated, enlightened members of society. He really makes it clear that an assessment system portfolio is not a "learning portfolio". He has drawn a line in the pedagogical sand and proclaimed that there are the assessment system portfolios and then there are REAL portfolios.
Here at Syracuse, the assessment system that is used as a tool to gather data for program review and accreditation needs is not readily available to students. Assessments are mapped to program proficiency standards and faculty rate student work on a 1-4 scale in a system that the students do not have access to. Most of the faculty do not have access to the database that stores that info. Data is collected through spreadsheets and fed into the assessment system by hand by just a few people.
An alternative approach for deploying an assessment system might open possibilities for reflection and formative feedback that we are currently missing. If the data was turned around so that students could see what ratings they received on each of the standards and why, it could stir up some really rich discussion between teachers and students. The Goal Management project that we started here was meant to make transparent the relationship between the program standards, classroom assignments and the data collection process that was being performed. Trent might say that this data only has an audience with deans, accreditors and department heads but I think that it may be the spark that starts students down the road to reflective thinking.
I'd like to think of an assessment system as a means to start a dialogue between teachers and learners around some common themes and a compliment to formative assessment and "assessment for learning", rather than a competitor to both. It is really how you design and use the system, not an inherent property of it. My guess is that there are ways to implement assessment systems that would encourage reflection and result in ideas that a student might take a lot of pride in. The key is in the teachers' ability to engage the student in conversation and seize the teachable moments that such a system makes possible.