Book Review

It Belongs to Me: A Guide to Portfolio Assessment in Adult Education Programs

Steve Reuys
Adult Literacy Resource Institute/SABES Boston Regional Center

It Belongs to Me: A Guide to Portfolio Assessment in Adult Education Programs, by Hanna Arlene Fingeret

For educators at all levels who are dissatisfied with standardized tests as the primary or sole means of student evaluation, and who are exploring various paths in what’s come to be called “alternative assessment,” the use of portfolios and portfolio assessment is one of the major options. Yet the concept of portfolios is not always clearly understood, and many practitioners who are interested may have questions about how to implement this approach.

Hanna Arlene Fingeret, a well-known adult educator who works with the Literacy South organization in Durham, North Carolina, was recently commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education to conduct a study of portfolio assessment in the world of adult literacy. It Belongs to Me: A Guide to Portfolio Assessment in Adult Education Programs, the result of this study, is “designed to introduce adult literacy educators to the concept of portfolio assessment, and to provide some guidance about how you can incorporate portfolio assessment into your work in adult literacy education.” It provides a clear, succinct, and very useful introduction.

Fingeret conducted both an extensive literature review and a wide-ranging series of interviews with more than 50 students, teachers, administrators, staff developers, and other practitioners across the country who are using portfolios in their adult literacy teaching and learning. Quotations from these interviews pop up throughout the text and constitute an important feature of this guide—important because so much of the literature on portfolios has emerged from the K-12 or college contexts, while these quotes present voices from the field of adult literacy; important, too, because they ground the discussion in reality in ways that no summary of findings by an author can ever really do; and important because, while acknowledging the difficulties of implementing portfolio assessment, these practitioners and learners clearly demonstrate their enthusiasm for the use of portfolios and their words will encourage others to move forward into this area as well.

It Belongs to Me begins with a brief discussion of what is meant by the term “portfolio assessment.” A portfolio is defined here as a selection of various materials that have been chosen from other, larger, on-going collections of materials related to a student’s work and achievement, both inside and outside the classroom. All sorts of items could be included in portfolios—pieces of writing, written responses to reading, reading logs, daily work, checklists, special projects, to name a few of the possibilities. The distinction between the portfolio itself and the folders or other “containers” from which materials are chosen for the portfolio is an important one and is not merely a matter of semantics or simply an issue of quantity. The process by which students review their work, select certain items for inclusion in the portfolio, and then assess this collection is probably the crucial aspect of the whole approach as Fingeret describes it. The value of using portfolio assessment lies not just in its passive product—the collection of items representing various aspects of a student’s work and achievement—but also in its active process, as a student gains valuable understanding of his/her own learning and accomplishments through selecting material for his/her portfolio and then assessing this portfolio collection itself. As writers Zessoules and Gardner note in an article on alternative assessment quoted by Fingeret, “No longer a weapon for rooting out and combating students’ weaknesses, assessment becomes an additional occasion for learning.”

Having looked at what portfolio assessment is (and isn’t), Fingeret then takes readers through a cyclical, four-stage implementation process organized under the headings of 1) choosing, 2) planning, 3) implementing, and 4) evaluating and revising portfolio assessment. Stage One asks teachers who are thinking of trying portfolio assessment to begin by deciding whether portfolio assessment is consistent with their views of literacy, instruction, and assessment. Fingeret reviews the various ways in which literacy is seen in the U.S. at this time, the different approaches to adult literacy instruction that exist within the field, and the current issues surrounding the use of standardized tests vs. various types of alternative assessment in adult literacy. She notes that “portfolio assessment is compatible with instruction that approaches literacy as a process of constructing meaning, in a learner-centered way,” but that “if you find that you support a more skills-based view of literacy, or that you see assessment as dependent on standardized test scores and the judgments of outside experts, then portfolio assessment will not be appropriate for your classroom or program.”

Teachers who elect to embark on a voyage of portfolio assessment are then shown in Stage Two a five-step planning process in which they begin to make decisions about and start to develop:

• the focus for the portfolio assessment process (for example, writing, reading, math, everything) and how pertinent materials will be collected in an on-going way in folders or other containers;
• the schedule by which students will review the material in their folders and develop their portfolios;
• the criteria to be used by students in selecting material for the portfolios;
• the process students will use in making choices and moving materials from folder to portfolio; and
• the criteria and process for assessing the contents of the portfolios on a periodic basis. Teachers are urged to work with and get support from other teachers while involved in this planning process (as well as during the other stages of portfolio assessment).

Top of page

As one teacher says, “The fact that I met with four other staff members on a regular basis was extremely helpful. It kept us motivated and kept the momentum going of the pilot project.... Support is really important when you’re piloting portfolio assessment.” You can make this exploration a solo flight, but it’s better to go with others.

Stage Three focuses on implementing portfolio assessment by following through on all the planning that was done in Stage Two. First, introduce the concept of portfolio assessment to students and encourage them to begin to think of portfolios as “an integral part of instruction.” Students then continue on with this process—creating folders to collect materials, developing criteria for choosing materials to move from the folders to their portfolios, actually reviewing materials and making selections, and assessing the portfolios of assembled materials. Though usually based on the general guidelines developed by the teacher during the planning stage, the specifics of the portfolio assessment process will emerge out of a (probably on-going) process of reflection, negotiation, and decision-making by the students themselves, both individually and as a class.

Stage Four calls for teachers to evaluate the portfolio assessment process they have tried out and to make changes as needed. Since there is no perfect recipe for carrying out portfolio assessment and since it is seen as a cyclical process of reflection, planning, implementation, and evaluation, teachers may want to circle back to any of the previous stages before continuing on.

It Belongs to Me ends by stepping back to look at the impact of portfolio assessment on students and teachers, at the process of implementing portfolio assessment at the program level, and at what steps are needed to support the continued growth of portfolio assessment in adult literacy. There are also an appendix containing a few sample documents used by some programs in their portfolio assessment process and an annotated bibliography of materials dealing with portfolio assessment.

Part of the on-going message of this guide is that doing portfolio assessment isn’t easy. It’s usually not something that either teachers or students are accustomed to doing, and getting comfortable with the process can take some time. Gathering materials for folders is much easier in some areas (such as writing) than in others (such as oral language use). Various cultures may vary in how they regard the idea of individuals highlighting their own achievements. Reporting the results of portfolio assessment to funders, evaluators, and policy makers is not a simple process. Working conditions in the field are often not conducive to doing portfolio assessment, which requires sufficient time (for staff development, planning, and preparation) and sufficient space (for secure storage of folders and portfolios). Fingeret and her “commentators” do address all these issues. Yet, without minimizing the difficulties, they also make clear that doing portfolio assessment is worth it.

Summing up its impact, Fingeret says, “Portfolio assessment is practical and useful, according to the practitioners and students who participated in this project. It redefines the scope of assessment, and provides a way to look at personal development as well as academic skill growth as reflected in new literacy practices. It facilitates a deeper level of reflection for students, and a deeper level of communication between students and teachers. It also promotes professional development and practitioner inquiry.”

Here are a few brief quotes from some of the teachers, administrators, and staff developers who contributed to this project:

In all my experiences, students are really excited about portfolio assessment and they feel, ‘This makes sense.’

It’s empowering to students, and that’s what I emphasize, how a portfolio helps students become independent learners and take responsibility for assessing their own work.

Portfolio assessment has minimized student attrition, and it seemed to keep staff better too. Portfolios help adults see where they’re at and therefore they stay.... Portfolios value teacher judgment; by giving multiple choice standardized tests, the message is that nobody’s judgment counts except for the test publisher.

When we did the share last year and people shared their portfolios there was a lot of pride.... With the portfolio the students saw exactly where they improved, they saw the kind of gain. People still talk to me about that.... They definitely want to continue with portfolio assessment.

Students, too, had positive things to say about the process. Lorna Irizarry, for example, is a student in New York, and it is from her words that the title for this report was taken. She says, “What I learned from my portfolio is that I’ve achieved what I wanted. I feel relaxed. It belongs to me. It’s for me to know,” and “Seeing my progress in the portfolio makes me know I can do the work.”

There is, of course, no “one size fits all” set of specific instructions for how to set up and do portfolio assessment. How it works out for one program, one teacher, one group of students will vary a great deal from what happens in other places, at other times, with other people. And it’s also important to remember that portfolio assessment isn’t the only possible approach to take when embarking upon alternative assessment; many other ideas have been presented here in the various issues of Adventures in Assessment and elsewhere. Fingeret’s guide, however, should provide a very helpful framework for teachers interested in trying out this particular approach.

Copies of It Belongs to Me can be obtained free of charge by writing to the Clearinghouse, Division of Adult Education and Literacy, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, DC 20202-7240; FAX (202) 205-8973.

Top of page

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 5 (October 1993), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1993.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.