Portfolio assessment is a process of evaluating the progress of students’ learning and understanding through the use of students’ portfolios. A student’s portfolio refers to a collection of works gathered over a specific duration of time, which helps a teacher to review the records of a student’s progress. These records include activities, artwork, writings, and other commendable works of a student in a subject or overall course. For portfolios to prove that they are valid means of assessing students, they need to measure what they are intended to. Due to the variety of items contained in a portfolio, there are several challenges that may make its validity questionable.
Portfolios should be able to elicit a clear purpose. The main reason why teachers use portfolios is for them to assess students’ learning over time. However, the validity of portfolios is questioned when these same students are involved in collecting and deciding what goes into them. It is more likely than not that a student will only put works that meet the requirements of the assessment criteria in the portfolio. A student would want a situation where they present themselves in the best way possible. If this is the case, issues of honesty are likely to arise, especially where others strive to generate portfolios that show a balanced view of their learning experience, that is, their weaknesses and strengths. Results obtained from portfolios that are not a true representation of students’ learning capabilities will not be valid for they will be based on false facts.
Another challenge to validity would be the content of the portfolio. As much as both the students and the teacher will work towards collecting several works to include in the portfolio, there has to be a limit of what goes into the portfolio. The portfolio’s content must be in line with the curriculum being examined. This poses a challenge because the teacher, besides doing the work of evaluating items in the portfolio, also has to monitor closely what students put in the portfolio. This in turn leads to more time being consumed in the process of trying to achieve a close relationship between the content and evaluation goals. Hence, achieving this content validity proves to be a tedious task that makes the whole process a complicated one.
If portfolios are to be viewed as valid, they also need to be assessed reliably. A portfolio typically represents sample works of students. Students present their works differently, and deciding on whether they are wrong or right may prove to be a difficult task. Instead these works are evaluated using inter rater reliability, that is, according to the raters’ agreement. Inter rater reliability therefore depends on the extensive skills and experience that raters have gained over the years that they are involved in using portfolios as a means of assessment. However, it all depends on judgement as there is no clear way to decide on what is wrong or right as it is in a marking scheme.
Despite these challenges, portfolio assessments contribute to the learning experience in various ways. They enhance students’ ability to think critically and to develop self evaluation skills. This is possible because they are able look at their sample works and judge whether they are headed towards success or failure. Through them, teachers can also measure students’ performance based on works that are a true reflection of their learning abilities. It is also possible for teachers to see the different ways that students accomplish goals, rather than try to find common ways that do not always work for all the students. Above all, they help teachers to identify students’ weaknesses and hence take corrective action in time.
Even though the whole process of portfolio assessment is a tiresome one, teachers opt to use it because it yields the above tangible benefits. Hence, they are ready to cope with the challenges of purpose, content validity and reliability, so as to ensure that they maximize the learning experience of their students, not only on the short term but also on the long term.