Portfolios are becoming increasingly popular in schools. Unlike tests, they can be used to gather information about what students can do over a long period of time.

The Tucson Unified School District's definition: A portfolio is a purposeful collection of work that exhibits effort, progress, performance and achievement over time. The portfolio documents skills, knowledge and personal qualities. Construction of a portfolio is collaborative and reflective. Portfolios at all grade levels offer one way to exhibit student achievement.

Benefits: Demonstrates student growth, provides a system to organize materials, shows learning other than test performance, stimulates ownership in the learning process, involves parents in the educational process, links formal learning and application.

An art portfolio, for example, might include samples of student 2-dimensional work and photos of 3-dimensional work along with student and teacher evaluations. A theater portfolio might include draft and final versions of scenarios or plays that have been written, photos of scene/costume designs, photos or videos of scenes performed along with student and teacher evaluations. In either portfolio, student "interrogation" of a master work or research on the history or role of the art form in a given culture might be included.

Project Zero's Seidel & Walters make five points about portfolios:

1. Assessment of portfolios reveals a student's particular profile of strengths, weaknesses, and "chosen challenges."

2. Portfolio assessment is inseparable from learning and thus occurs at several points in the term rather than only at the end of the school term.

3. Assessment of portfolios recognizes student growth. Assessment provides a picture of development by comparing student work from at least two points in time.

4. Students are central in assessment of portfolios. Student reflection is a form of self-assessment that can itself be assessed.

5. Portfolios are most effective when students are doing authentic work in a domain, work that is close in form and process to that done by adults in the domain. Portfolios are most revealing when students are engaged in sustained projects that call for original thinking. Engagement and inventiveness seem to develop most readily in classrooms in which students are given choices about the focus and direction of their work.

A student's portfolio should contain evidence of the process of learning; drafts and unsatisfactory works are included, along with final, or strong works. In addition, students include their own reflections or comments about their works.

Propel portfolios educate the students in addition to providing assessment information for other audiences. Portfolios are personal records of learning that can be used as a source for ideas and understanding.

Essay Questions, Interviews and Focus Group Questions

Essay Questions, which involve writing several paragraphs or several pages, allow students to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of a topic. Essays measure skills such as a student's ability to organize, integrate, and compare and contrast ideas, as well as demonstrate their writing ability.

This question type, however, requires considerable student time; its scoring requires more teacher time and can be more subjective than that of other types of questions. In addition, because essay questions take more time, tests, using them, cover less material than some other forms of testing.

A rubric to describe appropriate responses can help eliminate subjectivity and can shorten the teacher response time.

Interview and Focus Group Questions

Should be carefully constructed so that they yield the kind of information that will be helpful.

Example:

• What did you learn in this unit?
  
• What helped you most?
  
• What caused you problems?
  
• What did--or could have helped you over come the problems?
  
• What are your goals for the next unit? What skills do you want to focus on? What information/knowledge do you want to learn?