EDC 668 - Week 2 Blog

Why do educational organizations choose to employ portfolios? What value does the use of rubrics in evaluating activities and portfolios bring? How can peer review affect learning progress and growth?

Educational organizations choose to employ portfolios for a variety of reasons. Just as an experiment, I Google searched "portfolios" and the first site to come up was an organization site, boasting the use of portfolios in education. This website: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/earlycld/ea5l143.htm described portfolios as being:

"...collections of students' work over time. A portfolio often documents a student's best work and may include other types of process information, such as drafts of the student's work, the student's self-assessment of the work, and the parents' assessment. Portfolios may be used for evaluation of a student's abilities and improvement."

In just the same way, portfolios are used to highlight growth and learning achievements. Professional business portfolios are essentially a timeline of experience and with that experience, learning (should have) occurred.

Rubrics bring great value in examining growth and learning by way of portfolios and activities. It's easy for those measuring the personal's growth (whether it be a teacher, executive, principal, etc.) by basing it on an expectation that has already been set. In the same sense, teachers can use rubrics that were created to measure student achievement to their objectives in teaching. If a students portfolio includes how they learned to write their rounded letters, a teacher may remember back to his/her objectives in teaching and see whether the portfolio evidence measured to the standards of their lesson and met the lesson objective goals.

Peer review is also another successful method of accountability and learning that goes on when students critique one another and help them raise the bar for themselves. Students are often self-critical and can see areas of weakness in one another. They also are likely to find someone in their peer group that is strong in an area of weakness for them, finding not only an allie but another teacher who may shed some light on their struggles and help to improve this deficit.