Defining the portfolio

pen_art is cDo you regret the time lost with state mandated assessments? What if the products being assessed were actually part of the learning experience. That is one of the ideas behind the move to assess students through their portfolios. However, before students head helter-skelter into creating work for their portfolios, some planning needs to occur. Both teachers and students should know the purpose of the portfolio. There are basically four types and students are likely to keep more than one:

Instructional portfolio contains work selected by the student based on teacher input. As a teacher, you use this collection of work to prod the student into reflecting on own thought processes, and to help student pin down long-term goals. The student sets a general goal such as “I want to write exciting stories.” The teacher directs the student to set specific objectives for this goal such as “plan development and resolution of conflict in plot” or “create mood through vivid images.” This kind of portfolio helps provide a framework for individualized instruction.[1]

Personal/professional portfolio is aimed at whatever goals the student wants to achieve. The student is the primary stakeholder in this portfolio, and therefore, the most important person in selecting the products.  However, don’t expect students to select work without guidance. A good rule of thumb is to have half the pieces concentrated on one area to show depth of work, and the other half distinctly different in concept design to show breadth of work.

Program/college entry portfolios are limited to the type and number of entries that the admitting institution requires. It often resembles a professional portfolio, and includes samples of the students’ best work, with careful attention to format and organization. It may also contain biographical data, transcripts and test scores.[2] If students are having a difficult time determining what needs to go into their personal/professional portfolio have them research what the best institution for their area of interest requires for a portfolio.

Assessment portfolio provides data for student records or school accountability, but it has to include whatever products and evaluation data required by the school, district, or state. Ideally this kind of portfolio contains both samples of the student’s best work and pieces that are responses to required assignments. However, because it is difficult to grade different products using same scale, the requirements tend to be rigid.

Kentucky was one of the first states to adopt a writing portfolio as one of the ways to measure students statewide. Other states such as Ohio, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Hawaii are all moving to requiring a “senior project” as a high school graduation requirement.[3] Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin are adopting the use of an alternate assessment portfolio. If you have ever experience the adoption of this kind of assessment school, you’re probably familiar with the trials involved. (How many weeks do you want to spend grading?) These states’ have published grading rubrics for portfolios that you can adapt to your own needs. There is no need to reinvent the wheel to make education more relevant.

Art work by S.L.Listman

[1] Cole, K.B. & Struyk, L.R. (1997). Portfolio assessment: Challenges in secondary education. High School Journal, 80(4), 261- 272.

[2] Lankes, A.M. (1998). Portfolios: A new wave in assessment. T H E Journal, 25 (9),18-19. Paulson, F.L, & Paulson, P.R. (1991). The making of a portfolio. (ERIC)

[3]  Dietz, S. et al, (2010). State high school tests: Exit exams and other assessments. Center on Education Policy, Washington, DC.

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The case for the case

case2Portfolio – a portable case for holding papers – a simple name for a collection of works into which a person has poured hours of deliberation and sweat. Today the portfolio is just as likely to be stored on a flash drive that fits into the palm of a hand as in a case. But its purpose is still the same – to demonstrate the quality of work a person can do.

Prospective buyers and employers have been scrutinizing people’s portfolios for centuries. At one time most schools encouraged students to produce works worthy of their portfolio. However, with the increased popularity and ease of standardized testing, the production of quality work has often taken a back seat to test scores. Are the multiple-choice standardized tests scores easier to compare – Yes.  Are they a more accurate indicator of higher order thinking skills – not according to a sizable portion of educators.[1]

But, there are draw backs to requiring educational portfolios. Selecting pieces for it can be a mammoth task. This requires that students learn to keep track of all  stages of their  work–unfinished and preliminary work, and not just completed produces. Often they seem to struggle just to find yesterdays homework.

First, students must know what kind of things they must be able to put their hands on in order to review their own development, discuss work with teachers or peers, and finally fill their portfolio. Students should share with each other to present alternate ideas on how to track their work. Finally, using electronic storage, with appropriate back ups becomes a necessity to keep massive amounts of work in the classroom.

This task of maintaining what they have produced actually works better if the students determine how they will do this. Forcing a uniform system on all students often creates a disadvantage for capable students who do not think about organization in the same way. The portfolio should include documentation of a project in various stages (initial concept or sketch, rough and final draft), students’ ideas on the selection of products, and teachers’ written assessments of products. It also helps to have another teacher of the same subject to review possible portfolio products. That does double the work, but also makes the selection process easier and more accurate.

In 1983, Teresa Amabile first promoted use of “consensual assessment,” a way to grade the creative products without depending on any particular definition of creativity. Instead it relied on the knowledge and experience of judges. For this kind of comparative rating to work, the creative products must be from the same domain (i.e., writing, music, computer science). The judges must be very familiar with domain and should not confer with the other judges or do anything else to impose their criteria on the others.[2]

More recently, John Baer found that different kinds of experts (practitioners, critics, educators) in one field tend to agree on creativity. One group of judges rated the creativity of student poems, and stories and the following year, a different group with similar backgrounds evaluated the same works with similar results. But a major drawback remains with this “consensual assessment” technique it that it requires products be compared with each other because there are no norms.[3]

Even though a statewide comparison would be impossible using this technique, it works well on a small scale. When students finish school and enter the workforce, prospective employers will basically be doing the same thing__gathering in small groups to compare the resumes and work samples and using this comparison to determine who will be the most promising next, new employee.

[1] Cole, K.B. & Struyk, L.R. (1997). Portfolio assessment: Challenges in secondary education. High School Journal, 80(4), 261- 272.
[2] Beattie, D.K. (2000). Creativity in art: The feasibility of assessing current conceptions in the school context. Assessment in Education, 7, 175-192.
[3] Baer, J. (1994). Performance assessments of creativity: Do they have long-term stability? Roeper  Review, 17(1), 7-11

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Elaboration: the hardest part of creative writing

Elaboration is the process of presenting and developing an idea, by adding more detail to  explain the exterior situation so that the reader gains privileged access to interior thoughts of authors. Forming creativity into a product that someone else can absorb is such hard work that people often avoid it. This keeps ideas in the brain and off paper, not to be shared with others.

In Narrative writing the more descriptive a passage is, the slower it seems. However, the descriptions set a mood and allow the reader to feel like they are inside the story. Elaboration through setting the scene and revealing interior motivations allow readers to see what an author saw inside of their head.

In Informational writing the depth of explanation uses key details to develop the topic. This provides a rationale for what has occurred, is occurring, or could occur in the future. Elaboration builds on key ideas and exposes the cause behind effects.

In Opinion pieces elaboration expound on reasons that support opinions and conclusions. Without elaboration the connection between reader and the ideas of the author is weak or completely lacking.

After one has spun off multiple new possible ways of being creative it is time to stop the spinning and do the work to push one idea as far as possible. Elaboration is the act of  embellishing or adding details to an idea to enrich the initial concept.[1] This adding of details would seem to be the easiest of the creative tasks; however, elaboration scores based on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking are continuing to drop indicating an increased need to teach this particular creative skill. [2]

[1] Torrance, E. (1988). The nature of creativity as manifest in its testing. In Sternberg, R. (Ed.), The nature of creativity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Kim, Kyung Hee (2012) Yes, There IS a Creativity Crisis! http://www.creativitypost.com/education

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The ogre of orginality

prom 2011 (7) copy

The creative writer combines originality, complexity, independence of judgment, and aesthetic sensitivity according to the research of Frank Barron, who was known for his in-depth studies of the creative mind. His subjects often took extremely complex elements to produce a final product that was elegant and deceptively simple.

Barron found that creative people could hold two opposite views at the same time and yet see no contraction. Basically, they could be both naïve and knowledgeable, emotional and logical, or disciplined and free spirited.[1]

Such dichotomies tend to become better integrated  as people grow older. For creative adolescents, this lack of integration may appear as moodiness or fickle thinking as they try to balance ideas at opposite poles. For example, adolescents may push the envelope when it comes to being different from older people, but not from their peers. In fact this age group exhibits more conformity to their classmates than any other.

As teenagers are highly prone to conformity, they pay a lot of attention to what their classmates do. Grading based on originality encourages them to break this pattern of behavior. Of course, originality is determined by how an idea differs from those of one’s peers.  Rather than ask how a teacher can grade students based on what other students do, inquire how they cannot do this.

For a teacher comparing the work of students to each other becomes second nature with a few setting the bar for the rest of the class. However, originality is determined by how an idea differs from those of one’s peers, and not how much it follows the lead of those that the teacher favors. After students complete their assignments it is valuable for them to compare their ideas to others in their class. During this time they must to be encouraged not to imitate but differentiate when working.

Generating ideas that are original and different from others around them is extremely valuable for adolescents. These ideas are springboards to innovations and solutions to  problems of the future.

Barron, Frank and Harrington, David M., Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality by Frank Barron. Annual Review of Psychology, 32 (1981): 439–476

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Too rigorous for creativity

reading2A teacher voiced his frustration about getting gifted students past the hurdle of simply looking at events of a story to the uncover the devices that the author used in writing the story.  The students need to interpret the effect these literary devises had on the readers.

At that point I worked with children who had made this leap, despite needing help in reading due to dyslexia.  They did this because they were attempting to write stories themselves.  I suggested to the teacher that he could have students write short fiction so they could understand the process that an author went through. His response, “The curriculum is too rigorous and doesn’t allow time for creative writing. They can take that course if they want to.”

I don’t find this the most sensible route to take for many reasons. Bloom’s taxonomy used to place Evaluation on the top rung. The critique  was above the creator of the work. But, that was determined to be backwards and Synthesis was moved above Evaluation.

Overloading students with too much information without allowing them to practically implement what they have learned stifles their higher thinking skills. This leads to a kind of knowledge that de-emphasizes critical thinking. Why limit what has been learned by refusing to have the students make real products?

The reasons normally given: having students make creative products is a messy and inaccurate exercise that teachers dread, and how exactly do you grade this kind of work. The teacher is not the only one that needs to tackle this problem. Students are going need to know how to apply their effort towards tasks requiring imagination.

When faced with this challenge, teachers can ask for student input on grading criteria. Projects that call for large doses of creative input can be made easier by putting everyone through the process from start to finish. Grading, which requires evaluation skills, is something students need to learn in order to produce more innovative work. After all, the definition of creativity requires that a product be both original and useful.

[1]  Torrance, E. (1999). Torrance test of creative thinking:  Norms and technical manual.  Beaconville, IL: Scholastic Testing Services.

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To cheat or not to cheat

GLOBE2a

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“To cheat or not to cheat, that is the  question
Whether ’tis nobler to in the mind to suffer
The sleepless nights of outrageous homework
Or to take arms against a sea of academia
And by opposing end it. To cheat, to pass —
No more– and by passing to say we end
The headache and the thousand hours of study
That students are heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To cheat, to pass–
To excel–perchance to be caught:
Ay, there’s the rub”

 

With apologies to William Shakespeare for  revising his work, I find this a fitting way to point  to a major dilemma in education today.

Living in a global village makes information easier to obtain. Therefore, instructors have requested increasing amounts of work, which has a tendency to lead to increasing amounts of academic dishonesty. In a recent study on academic dishonesty at the University of North Carolina students completed a survey (anonymously of course) confessing the type of cheating that they were most likely to indulge in. The results according to frequency were as follows:

1st – copying someone else’s paper (for instance, lab reports or group projects)

2nd- knowing that someone else was cheating but not reporting it

3rd – getting an answer from someone else’s paper during a test

4th – using unauthorized information sources during a take-home exam

5th -giving or receiving unauthorized help but still signing the Honor Pledge

6th- plagiarizing parts or all of a paper [1]

The conclusion to this study was that students perceive cheating to be easier and not as risky when writing a paper as compared to other academic work, particularly taking a test. [1]   Whenever Internet access is introduced to schools, cheating and plagiarism multiply. Schools increasingly use software designed to check for plagiarism in papers, but there is away around this – pay for another person to write the paper. Writing college papers for additional income has occurred for years; however, Michael Trucano has noted that the Internet makes this even easier:

“In an age where the ‘outsourcing’ of certain jobs and tasks is considered normal business practice, how should we feel about students who, for example, contract out their homework to well educated online ‘tutors’ based in places like India, Pakistan and Egypt?”[2]

Many business have moved from the local workforce in an attempt to bypass labor restrictions and increase profits. Are students learning to do the same thing in education – bypass their own limitations by hiring someone else to do the work for them? In the end the student may get the diploma, but the other person may get the job.

Photo: Shakespeare’s Globe Theater by Gerd Thiele

[1] “Which Methods of Cheating Are Most Common at UNC?” in Academic Dishonesty at UNC: A Collaborative Study, Part IV Report by Stephanie Eissens and Jacques Stanislaus; Research performed by Melissa Cox, Stephanie Eissens, Abby Martin, and Jacques Stanislaus. (accessed Dec. 28, 2012)
[2] Crowdsourcing, collaborative learning or cheating?  In Edutech, by Michael Trucano,  Wed May 4, 2011  (accessed Dec. 28, 2012)

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Bucking creative standards


Fredricksburg 046a
A few years ago, my daughter and I visited the National Portfolio day in Dallas. Over fifty leading art colleges were present to review students’ art work – a sort of hotbed of the creative future. My daughter quickly realized that while considered extremely artistic and original in her own school, she was below average when compared to students across a multi-state region.

Most people want to assume they are above average, but statistically they cannot be. Looking at average grades in high school will reveal that the bell curve doesn’t come down as low on the high end. More students make A’s than F’s. This grade inflation tends to make grades less meaningful and the dependence on standardized tests greater. It also helps to promotes the “I’m better than average” illusion.

We often hear high praises for the experience of living in a global village, but there is a downside for those who discover they are not as valuable as they assumed within their own little community. When cultures meet, there is also a competition for whose definition of unique and original work will be accepted. For example, at the National Portfolio Day in Dallas excellent photography was assumed to be simple, high contrast with strong lines and obvious artificially-enhanced color. Many students produced those kinds of photographs, but the quality was not all the same.

The university representatives grading the art of perspective students had to be discriminating. Otherwise, they would lump together the examples of photography that fit the current culture’s definition of creativity and ignore inventive photos that did not follow those “standards.” Adapting to creative work as championed by one culture essentially narrowed the definition of originality. There was less variety of original work being introduced to the public because works with certain techniques (those not in vogue) were being tossed aside by students unwilling to risk creating novelty.

Can we make everybody a good student? No. Despite many attempts to level the playing field only some students rise from a background of disadvantages and lack of family involvement to become excellent students. We should continue to strive for equality in education because some will keep rising. But, there are also students that have these advantages who receive the benefit of inflated grades despite not earning them. This should not be so.

We cannot make everyone creative, either. Simply imitating what has been considered  inventive is a safe bet and not true originality. In the end, my daughter learned from experience at the Portfolio Day. She came to understand what she needed to improve from the critiques of her work, and the kind of boundaries that she would push in order to produce work more original than the “standards.”

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It’s all about “things”

thingsAt the beginning of the second millennium, educators followed the latest trend, focusing on changing students with the idea of making them “better people.” What students learned or produced was secondary. However, creativity is driven by the desire to produce an important, lasting work.

According to DiSC, a personality inventory often administered to college students and adults, the creative person’s desire is for a major achievement, of both high originality and high quality. The “weakness” with this group is that they are often private and closed-natured, not informing others of their thoughts. So the teachers never feel that they are improving their personalities.

Proponents of group interaction encourage these students to open up and express themselves more freely. Further reading about DiSC indicates why the creative types are not always open, People have a tendency to dislike them when they are open because they correct other’s errors.[1]  I talked to one of these people privately who was honest enough to say “Most people really don’t want to hear what I have to say. They are wrapped up in how I view them and have no desire to really look at things critically.” The emphasis on “things” is the key.

Often we judge people on appearance, speaking ability, an attitude of optimism and confidence. The creative person values what is produced. Helping a budding creative student take ideas scattered across several spiral notebooks and consolidate them into real products is one of the most helpful things a teacher can do.

For example, a student sits in a class and listens, reads and takes notes. The student then completes the answer sheet for a test, which is basically a meaningless list of letters and numbers unless viewed with the test. Occasionally, the student writes about a subject, using a pencil to regurgitate what was said in class on a piece of notebook paper. The result is no more professional or original than the cast of characters that some students doodle in the spiral notebooks. The student leaves high school with few products worth keeping.

Many students desire to turn knowledge into something that can be seen, heard or touched. They want to create their own portfolio. Technology has eliminated some of the logistical problems with keeping portfolios of work. Performances are preserved as video, artwork as visual files, and writing as text documents. Technology has even becomes the media itself resulting in applications and multimedia creations. (However, be aware that the program platforms of today maybe be incompatible with the electronic devices of tomorrow.) The problem that still remains is the effort required to make original, quality products, in an environment that focuses on rapid absorption of information.

The major drawback of making products in school is time. Much time is used in researching, brainstorming, creating, evaluating and reworking to produce something that is quality, not cheap and cookie-cutter in design. But that is also the value of this approach.

“If I talk about children as constructing meaning, or the need for critical and creative thinking, I lose my parents. Not all of them are eager to have children who raise questions or who want to go away when they go to college. Instead, I have to find a local basis for the changes I need to make. So, for instance, when it comes time to talk about portfolios, I don’t spend much time on the usual lines about student choice and ownership, or mathematical power. There isn’t one of my families that doesn’t worry about their kids always wanting new things, or not knowing how to fix or value the things they have.  One of them calls it “mall fever.” So, I explain that portfolios are about helping kids to learn to take care of things, to work hard at getting something right, for valuing hard work, for repairing things.”

From Denny Palmer Wolf’s interview with Kentucky teacher

[1] http://www.axiomsoftware.com/disc/interpretations/dc.php
[2] Honig, B. & Alexander, F. (1995). Rewriting the tests: Lessons from the California state assessment system. In J.B.Baron & D.P.Wolf (Eds.), Performance-based student assessment: Challenges and Possibilities. Ninety-fifth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I (pp. 143-165). Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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Cross country classes

Map_students2 copyWorking on training projects with teams members across the US and Canada gave me a  taste of the difficulty that occurs with on-line collaboration.  At first, I was reluctant to bother other team members except as required. However I soon found regular verbal communication essential for me and appreciated by the others. I felt I knew one member so well from constant phone conversations, that I was shocked to see what he actually looked like. E-learning classes are an excellent place to learn the skills that make remote teams click. Instructors have an additional challenge designing collaborative course work, because companies have a more established structure for remote teams.

Start by selecting software that enables student communication. A well designed Learning Management System (LMS) makes a huge difference. Students should be able to create “profiles” for the course in the same manner that they might do on a social networking sight like Facebook or LinkedIn. In addition to employment or educational goals and interests this should contain a personal statement about why they are taking the course. This kind of profile helps the instructor chose groups that are diverse, splitting up those that work together, live near each other or having similar interests, so all students will have to make an effort to collaborate. Student groups should ideally be between 4 and 6 people: groups smaller than 4 will struggle if anyone doesn’t participate; groups larger than 6 will splinter into smaller groups, or fail to bond.

Courses should provide access to chat rooms and ideally telephone conferencing in addition to boards or wikis. As part of the requirements for collaborative work students need to set up and document the role of each member. They also need to coordinate and conduct synchronous on-line meetings, keeping a record of what has been accomplished in each. Students are more responsible to others in their group if they have a chance to give and receive immediate feedback from other members.

Don’t assume students know professional behavior for internet communication. Course documents should describe briefly describe standards for appropriate on-line behavior. You can have students cc all e-mails between group members to instructor (this is done by management in some businesses). You also need to develop a subject line indication to for e-mails that require a response from you. (You might need to remind them that it is proper netiquette to include a subject line in all e-mails.)

The last and stickiest subject is how to allow team members to rate their fellow classmates. If this is not part of the grade, some students will be working much harder than others on the collaborative projects without any additional benefit. Students should not grade the work produced by others, but rate the amount of effort for each member and how well that person worked with group. They also shouldn’t be able to affect another student negatively without a legitimate supporting argument.

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Unwilling to share

A-fest12 003cWhen secondary students think about collaboration on the Internet, it might mean spreading news about a party using Facebook, or spending a night battling in StarCraft with players across the continent. Throw the word “education” into the mix and they think about finding the website from which the teacher copied the last physics worksheet in order to locate the answers (or at least an explanation of how to solve the problems). They might agree to split their assigned novel among a small group of friends. Then, they exchange plot and character notes so that nobody has to read more than one hundred pages. The tendency is to see the Internet as a place from which they can glean information or comment as they please. However, even “digital natives” often flounder when it is their responsibility to start up or maintain an active collaboration on-line for a class.

Collaborative learning has long been held forth as a force to help students to move into new areas of critical thinking that they cannot master on their own. [1]  Despite the increasing amount of hours spent on-line, students often seem to lack expertise, or desire to work in a group over the Internet. Their reluctance to do this seems to be for the same reasons many dislike group work in class. They may feel they have little control over the quality of the end product; they worry about  having to do more work to make up for a lazy class mate; or the sometimes coordination and time required is just too much trouble.[2]

Having taken college courses both in classrooms and on-line, I found that there were subtle advantages to direct human interaction when one must collaborate. Being able to read facial expressions, tone of voice and provide immediate feedback help reduce repetitive instructions. Expressing complex, creative ideas that were not easily comprehended was difficult in on-line chat and boards, so most people did not try to do this. Students repeated catch phrases that were light on real content. Many of the posts were so very similar that there seemed to be little point in reading them all. Even “private” e-mails and chat tended to have carefully thought out, conformist tone. Instructors required that students contribute to on-line discussions boards, otherwise many students who were talkative in class would be silent on an electronic interface.

Collaborative learning on the Internet may not be spontaneous, but creative sharing and learning can still exist. The instructor has to consciously plan to get students to buy into this. What does this require?

  1. Structuring courses so that on-line collaboration is integral part of learning
  2. Determine appropriate group size for various collaborative activities
  3. Using software that enables student communication without too steep of a learning curve
  4. Providing data-bases of information to keep students from wandering aimlessly on the web
  5. Setting up guidelines for appropriate on-line community behavior.
  6. Modeling on-line community behavior as an instructor by vigilant reviewing and feedback.

Use of the Internet is not a “magic bullet” to ensure learning, but a new medium for transmitting information. The instructor must be aware of  how it alters the way students learn to use it effectively.

“It may seem trivial to say that a medium has no effect in general, but the history of educational technology shows that every new technology (television, computers, hypertexts, multimedia, Internet, virtual reality, …) raise a wave of naive expectations regarding to the intrinsic effects of these technologies.”[3]

[1]Vygotsky, L.S. Mind in Society, Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1978 p. 79-91
[2]Chiong, Raymond & Jovanovic, Jelena. Collaborative Learning in Online Study Groups:  An Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective Journal of Information Technology Education: Research  Volume 11, 2012, p. 82.
[3] Dillenbourg, P., Schneider, D.K. & Synteta, P. (2002) “Virtual Learning Environments” in A. Dimitracopoulou (Ed.) Proceedings of the 3rd Hellenic Conference Information & CommunicationTechnologies in Education (pp.3-18) Kastaniotis Editions, Greece
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/07/01/PDF/Dillernbourg-Pierre-2002a.pdf (accessed Dec. 28, 2012)

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