It is hard to disagree that most students and teachers find portfolio assessments to be an integral aspect of the education path. While this is a rather time-consuming process that has a number of disadvantages, including the challenge of defining a fair system of evaluation of different works, portfolio assessment also has many advantages (Venn, 2000). For instance, it boosts students’ creativity and self-evaluation, promotes critical thinking, and encourages students and educators to share the responsibility of progress evaluation and goals setting.
There are several most important features that all portfolio assessments need to include. To begin with, as noticed by researchers, it is required to determine the portfolio’s initial purpose, meaning, whether it is a ‘process’ or ‘product’ one (Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability, 2020). This step is one of the most crucial ones because it defines the content of the portfolio and impacts the following features. Second, it is necessary to think about the specific standards that the particular portfolio assessment will need to follow to be informative and structured (Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability, 2020). The third essential feature is the cooperation between the student and the teacher: both have to play an important role in the portfolio assessment, make decisions, and consider some relevant changes.
There is an additional significant characteristic of the process under discussion. As stated by Meador (2020), a proper portfolio assessment has to highlight “learning and growth over an extended period of time” (para. 6). Consequently, one of the primary features of portfolios is that they include the best samples of students’ works: poems, art works, lab reports, presentations, journal entries, and other pieces that demonstrate the specific growth from the starting point.
References
Center for Standards, Assessment, and Accountability. (2020). Portfolio assessments: Narrator’s script [PDF document]. Web.
Meador, D. (2020). The purpose of building a portfolio assessment. ThoughtCo. Web.
Venn, J. J. (2000). Assessing students with special needs (2nd ed.). Merrill.