“Portfolios offer students unique opportunities such as:
- Shared decision-making and control in learning
- Examination of individual work and growth
- Active participation in the literacy and learning process
- Reflection on student strengths as well as weaknesses
- Engagement in student's own personal story of how learning takes place (Wolf, 1989)
- Self-assessment of ongoing growth
- Greater responsibility for learning
- Improved skills in an authentic setting” (Benson & Smith, 1998, p.173)
In Portfolio Picks: An Approach for Developing Children's Metacognition Elida Laski discusses how portfolios are a developmentally appropriate self-assessment tool for young students. Portfolios give a great deal of data in order to inform teachers differentiation. Additionally portfolios offer evidence of students growth, improvement, and understanding of subject matter that can allow for family engagement in students learning. Just like any other type of self-assessment portfolios take a great deal of modeling, thinking out loud, and practice for students to become sufficient in the metacognitive skills needed for self-assessment.
Findings were similarly found by Benson and Smith (1998). They found 3 main benefits to portfolio assessment: portfolios communicate to families, students learn the skill of self-assessment, and portfolios guide teachers’ instructional decision making after seeing students growth and gaps. When communicating with families teachers found it beneficial to have artifacts to show students growth and areas of weakness. Some teachers showed examples of exemplary work to parents to compare their child’s work. Teachers in this study did find an increase in childrens self-assessment skills like much of the other research they found that modeling, practice, and sharing were great strategies to assist students thinking. Teachers developed a portfolio centre in order to have small group instruction and conferences about individual students work. Some of the questions they asked during the portfolio centre include:
- “What piece of work shows you to be a great writer? Why?
- What paper do you feel you did the very best on and why?
- Which is your best story? What makes a good story?
- What paper are you most proud of?
- What paper was the very hardest for you to do?
- How did you feel after you finished this paper?
- What is your best handwriting? Math work?
- What part of this paper really makes you feel good?” (Benson & Smith, 1998, p.177)
In Art students have been practicing their self-assessment skills at the end of March students looked back at their work since January and select their best piece that they wanted to display on the bulletin board outside our classroom. It was great to see the answers of what students were proud of reflected our art goals.
In our class we have a weekly communication tool that the students take home. The students summarize what they did in their subjects throughout the week and set goals for the next week to come. In addition we added that students selected one piece of work from throughout the week that they were proud of, I would then photocopy this and students would attach this to be sent home. This allowed students the opportunity to self-assess their work and in addition brought the parents into this process so that they can have meaningful conversations about their work at home.