Designing a Portfolio Assignment

Students learn from making portfolios when they are asked to select artifacts for a particular purpose, justify their choices, and make connections across multiple examples, instances, or realms of experience. Portfolio assignments work best when they present a problem to students—one that requires synthesis and reflection to solve, and in which selected artifacts illustrate the problem and its solution or serve as evidence in support of a claim.

In deciding how to use Portfolio, consider the following topics. Each topic includes questions to help you think through the design of your Portfolio assignment.

Defining the Purpose

What is the purpose of the portfolio in your course? What role does the portfolio play in the course as a whole?
Is there a specific audience for the portfolio? If so, are there specific design aspects students might want to consider?
Will students be required to publish their portfolio as part of the course?

The purpose of the portfolio in your course should be clearly defined at the start. Portfolios may be used to:

• demonstrate achievement of particular knowledge or skills;
• show growth or improvement;
• document the process of creating a product or solving a problem;
• reflect on personally significant work or experiences;
• present best work (i.e. for a job interview);

Be sure the purpose of the portfolio assignment is clear to you (and your TAs, if applicable) and clearly communicated in your course materials.

The Catalyst Portfolio tool allows students to publish their portfolios to the Web. This function allows students to present their work to a wide range of audiences and, if they wish, to elicit feedback from visitors. Tell students early on if publishing their portfolios will be a requirement of the assignment. Reflective portfolios in particular have the potential of being very personal, and some students may consider mandatory publication of their work a violation of privacy.

Structuring the Portfolio

Who will design the structure of the portfolio (number and layout of pages, artifacts, etc.)? You? Your TA? The student?
Will you require certain items to be in the portfolio? Or will students self-select some or all of the items?
What elements in the portfolio are essential to its success?

In its most basic form, a portfolio is simply a collection of work, usually accompanied by commentary that explains the purpose of the collection and the reason for including particular items. Catalyst's electronic Portfolio tool is designed in terms of "pages" and "sections," allowing different groupings of artifacts and text/commentary under different headings. The particular artifacts to be included in the portfolio may be designated by you, the instructor, or selected by students; many portfolios are a combination of teacher-selected and student-selected work.

Catalyst's Portfolio tool allows three options for portfolio creation:

1. You can design a structured Portfolio project and distribute this project to students to complete.
2. You can design a model portfolio and invite students to download it and use it as a guide in developing their own portfolio.
3. You can ask students to design a portfolio on their own.

Please see our Practical Tips for more information about these options.

Whichever option you choose, you (or your students) may want to do some preliminary sketches of an organizational layout. How many artifacts will be featured? What are the natural divisions of accompanying text? What kind of information will be needed to orient a reader to the purpose and content of the portfolio? These sketches will help you make decisions about structure once inside the Portfolio tool.

Clarifying objectives and goals

What do you want students to know and be able to do at the end of your course?
How might students use a portfolio to demonstrate what they have learned?
Almost all portfolios are persuasive documents. What is the argument or case you want students to be able to construct through presentation of artifacts? How will their commentary on those artifacts help to structure that argument or case?

Be sure to design a portfolio assignment that will clearly elicit evidence of student learning related to your course objectives. Let students know early on if they should collect certain artifacts/kinds of artifacts to illustrate their knowledge and skills. As you plan your course, think about designing class activities and/or assignments so that students will create or collect essential artifacts and develop the skills they need to create a strong, persuasive portfolio.

How will you integrate the Portfolio project into your curriculum and your instruction?

Help students to see the connection between what you are doing in class and what they are being asked to do in Portfolio. Some instructors ask that students complete a Portfolio page before a specific class as preparation for discussion. Others may use a portfolio assignment as a way to extend classroom activities, or to reflect on learning over the quarter. Where appropriate, make mention of the Portfolio assignment throughout the course, and engage students in discussion about the content (not merely the requirements) of their portfolios as they develop them.

How will you provide students with feedback on their performance?

The feedback function built into the Catalyst Portfolio tool allows you (or others you designate) to provide comments on student work within portfolio. Specific, constructive feedback on the quality of their artifacts reflections, and on the organization, and design of their portfolio can help students understand the criteria for "good work." Keep in mind, however, that providing such feedback takes time. If your time is limited, students can still benefit from general feedback you might provide after reviewing a range of portfolios. This feedback can be delivered to all in class or via email. Either way, students appreciate knowing that someone is looking at their work.

Assessing learning

Will you assess students' portfolios? If so, what criteria will you use?
How will you communicate these criteria to your students before they begin working on the assignment?
Will you give a single grade to the portfolio as a whole, or will you assess its components separately?

Portfolios can be excellent tools for both formative and summative assessment, and they provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their own learning. When designing your portfolio assignment, consider how each component of the portfolio - artifacts and reflections - will provide evidence of student achievement in relation to your learning objectives.

The following are examples of possible criteria to evaluate portfolios. The specific criteria you use will depend largely on the specific purpose of the portfolio assignment.

1. Completeness: Did the student provide evidence of the knowledge and skills targeted in the portfolio assignment?
2. Rationale: Did the student adequately justify their selected artifacts as evidence of the targeted knowledge and skills?
3. Quality of evidence: What is the quality of the evidence students included in the portfolio?
4. Overall quality: What is the quality of the portfolio overall? (You might consider this in relation to completeness, range of artifacts/evidence, and proficiency.)

Rubrics are commonly used to evaluate portfolios. Rubrics provide descriptions of different levels of achievement in relation to specified criteria. For example, the rubric below describes four levels of achievement in relation to the overall quality of a portfolio (#4 above; adapted from Skawinski & Thibodeau, 2002):

Regardless of the method you use to evaluate student portfolios, it is important to share your assessment criteria with students early and often. Sample portfolios that illustrate successful (and perhaps unsuccessful) finished products can also help students understand what is expected of them.