Book Review

Portfolios in the Writing Classroom

Don Robishaw
SABES / World Education

Yancy, K.B. (Ed.) (1992). Portfolios in the Writing Classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Alternative approaches to Assessment that enables adult literacy students to evaluate their own experiences and progress come to us in many forms today. These approaches help students view their own learning process in writing. They also help teachers identify the strategies students use and how these strategies change as they progress as learners. The use of portfolios as an assessment tool is one approach that has become quite popular in our field recently.

Many adult literacy/adult basic education (AL/ABE) practitioners are using portfolios in their writing classrooms. Portfolios in the Writing Classroom contains a range of essays on that very subject.

The book begins with an essay that discusses the relationship among portfolio assessment, summative assessment and formative assessment. It also discusses what might be called “reflective evaluation,” a form of self evaluation considered very important to the writing process. The use of portfolio assessment in the writing class relies heavily on a self reflective process.

The article also deals with the challenges that the portfolio movement in the United States faces:

1. Weakening of effect through careless imitation (fear of the “band-wagon” effect, as happens in so many other areas of innovations).

2. The failure of research to validate this pedagogy. (Many still believe that “it” has to be measurable and countable to be valid and worth doing.)

3. The co-optation by large scale external testing programs. (There may be incongruities between large scale portfolio testing and writing portfolios used in the classroom.)

As in the introductory article, the remaining authors are not from an AL/ABE background, but mostly from fields related to formal schooling. Still, some of these discussions will be of interest to the AL/ABE professional.

The remaining articles are described as follows:

“Collectively, the chapters reflect a movement from the self initiated use of portfolios, as narrated in Sue Ellen Gold’s chapter, and from the individual struggling to make sense out of a general “assignment” to introduce portfolios, as described by James Newkirk, towards the use of portfolios taken up by teachers working together in community. Catherine D’Aoust’s teachers are still working individually, but support each other in a university seminar on ‘Teachers as Researchers’. Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith describe a middle school faculty cooperating with outside researchers to learn how to derive insights from a shared portfolio project — insights about students and about how portfolio projects work. Roberta Camp’s portfolio project grew out of cooperation between theorists, educational testers, administrators, and teachers of the performing arts, for whom portfolio took on a special function as instruments for student growth allowing assessment of the learning processes as well as the products… David Kneeshaw discusses portfolio from an even larger perspective in his description of the Ontario “Writing Folder” project, intended to allow evaluation and record keeping as a student moves across grade levels, but designed as well to encourage much of the same sense of discovery by teachers and students that characterizes the individual accounts... Irwin Weiser tells the last story, of a considered decision to introduce portfolios into the basic writing program at Purdue University, primarily as a way to defer summative grading” (pp. 13-14).

The book’s editor concludes with a short essay on the importance of self reflection and portfolios in the wiring classroom. She also leaves us with many unanswered questions that can be perhaps best answered by the individual teacher and his or her individual students.

There are a growing number of articles, but only a few books on the subject of portfolios, either as an assessment tool for reading and writing or an approach to helping students improve their writing. Kathleen Blake Yancy has put together this collection of essays on the use of it as an evaluation tool and on the “pedagogy of portfolios.”

I especially recommend this book to practitioners in our field who, because of the focus of Adventures in Assessment, and the recent “creative wave” of assessment tools by many Massachusett’s AL/ABE practitioners that we may primarily think of portfolios as an inno-vative approach to assessment. In reality, though, it is more important to think of portfolios as an excellent self reflective writing tool and as an important pedagogical approach to the teaching of writing.

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This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 6 (Spring 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

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.