From those needs, the Association of American Colleges and Universities' (AAC&U) Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education (VALUE) project emerged.
E-portfolios as a Medium for Learning
Technology is expanding the modes through which students learn and can demonstrate their learning. No longer are they restricted solely to the printed word but can do so in multiple modes: video, audio, in-the-field community projects, and graphics, for example. These multi-modal approaches are the ways students will need to work in the future: They may need to construct a variety of graphical data displays that effectively communicate with a range of audiences, or capture work in videos, or work in groups using social networking.
E-portfolios provide a means for collecting assigned work, as well as students' accomplishments in non-classroom settings, so that faculty, internship supervisors, and others can assess it and aggregate or disaggregate the results, depending on the purposes of the assessment. There is a need for some means of linking assessments of work done in individual classes with those done by other faculty and evaluators when they are for purposes of programmatic or institutional evaluation; this creates a concomitant need for shared expectations for student performance on a set of specified learning outcomes.
In contrast to transcripts, e-portfolios (with their added value of the “e” or electronic nature) allow students to gather in one place a range of digital artifacts that can be used to demonstrate presentation skills (e.g., a video of a presentation and accompanying slides), inquiry and analysis (e.g., a paper that includes instructor feedback and is annotated by the student to highlight key points), or intercultural knowledge (e.g., reflections on a term spent abroad illustrated with photos and reflections). The representations of learning in an e-portfolio reflect the individual student's view of the breadth of his or her education – including what was learned both inside and outside the classroom and as the learning was experienced by the student and not just as it was delivered or packaged by the college or professor. (Chen, June 3, 2010)
Chen, H. and Light, T. P. (2010) Electronic portfolios and student success: Effectiveness, efficiency, and learning., Association of American Colleges and Universities., Washington, DC.
An alternative response to the calls for measures of student learning has been to use existing national standardized tests of general intellectual skills. These tests focus on three primary learning outcomes: written communication, problem solving/analysis, and critical thinking. They are administered to samples of freshmen and seniors, typically in a timed environment. The results are summarized and available at an institutional level, but they are often not reliable at the individual student level and so are not reported to individual students. A key weakness of this kind of assessment strategy is that the tests are not high stakes, so there is neither an incentive for students to perform well nor a penalty for their not taking the exam seriously.
demonstrations of a much broader array of learning outcomes than the existing tests address—
VALUE Rubrics
Intellectual and Practical Skills
- Inquiry and analysis
- Critical thinking
- Creative thinking
- Written communication
- Oral communication
- Reading
- Quantitative literacy
- Information literacy
- Teamwork
- Problem solving
- Civic engagement
- Intercultural knowledge and competence
- Ethical reasoning
- Lifelong learning
- Integrative and applied learning
E-portfolios also require students to reflect on their learning, which is in itself a learning exercise. As Kathleen Blake Yancey has argued:
Collectively, Dewey, Vygotsky, and Polanyi define reflection as a process by which we think: reviewing, as we think about the products we create and the ends we produce, but also about the means we use to get to those ends; and projecting, as we plan for the learning we want to control and accordingly, manage, contextualize, understand. We learn to reflect as we learn to talk: in the company of others. To reflect, as to learn (since reflection is a kind of learning), we set a problem for ourselves, we try to conceptualize that problem from diverse perspectives – the scientific and the spontaneous – for it is in seeing something from divergent perspectives that we see it fully. Along the way, we check and confirm, as we seek to reach goals that we have set for ourselves. Reflection becomes a habit, one that transforms. (Yancey, 1998, pp. 11–12)
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