From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

• They help us come to terms with growing pressure for authentic assessment from administration and accrediting organizations.
• They encourage students to "collect, select, and reflect" (Yancey 15, "Introduction" in Electronic Portfolios) upon pieces that demonstrate their learning.  Thus, the students become more actively involved in assessing their own learning.
• They help students connect their learning in a class to other classes and life experiences. They look backward (reviewing), forward (projecting), and around them (connecting).
• They allow students to use writing to demonstrate and reflect upon learning. Reflecting in writing "makes thinking visible" (Yancey 17,"Introduction" in Electronic Portfolios).  "Writing objectifies thought" (Ong), making it possible for students to see and manipulate the words that represent their learning process.
  
• They broaden the spectrum of assessment, which, in some cases, is limited to multiple-choice tests.
• They have the potential to change the climate of learning on a campus. Reflecting on how learning takes place is the key to dialogue: student to student, student to teacher, students and teachers to administrators, and so on.
  

• They take up less space than paper-based portfolios.
• They can be reproduced, shared, or sent at almost no cost. (CD, email, the Web)
• They can be updated easily, yet previous copies can be archived.
• They are conducive to multiple iteration and reiteration, to showing revision and progress among drafts of reflections and reports.
  
• They can be repurposed for class, internship, and program assessment, graduation requirements, or the job search.
• They can include all the forms of media that the computer is capable of displaying.
• They are interactive; students can link from document to document, or to outside resources, to show how the learning is embedded in a social and intellectual context.
• They can be set up with customized access features, ranging from completely private, to student/instructor, to the entire class, to prospective employers, or to the whole world.

• They encourage reflective practice, an integral part of experiential education.
• They can provide templates for student articulation of reflection and evidence in terms of the class, program, or CEIA outcomes.
• They provide an easy, web-based point of contact and sharing between intern and college supervisors/faculty.
• They can provide material for, and/or can be reshaped into certification or job search portfolios.
• They allow the student to make different sets of artifacts and reflections available to different audiences; e.g. work supervisors, internship coordinators, professors, and prospective employers.
• They allow students to document progress and display work in a variety of media.
• They encourage best practices in the creation and maintenance of an online persona.
  

1. History and Overview
A. Electronic portfolio initiatives
Faculty development workshop on electronic portfolios, 2001
Society for Technical Communication workshop on professional electronic portfolios, 2001
Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program on electronic portfolios, 2002
Professional electronic teaching portfolios for pre-certification teachers, 2002

B. Assessment initiatives in First-Year Composition (FYComp)

We were aware of

• The demand for authentic assessment, locally and nationally
• The demand for consistency across many sections of FYComp, balanced with
• The need for instructors and TAs to be able to teach using their individual strengths, not try to fit into a preset curriculum

WPA Outcomes Statement

• It defines what students should be able to DO at the end of a FYComp class or program.
• It doesn't really describe our program, so it had to be adapted.
• It uses language we did not completely understand.
• We modified it to create our own outcomes statement.
• Through this process of discussing and debating just about every word,  we learned a great deal about our strengths and weaknesses as a program. 
  
• I recommend this process to anyone contemplating program assessment initiatives.
  
• Our FYComp committee approved draft versions of these outcomes in 2003.
• They can be found under "Goals and Guidelines" on our FYComp web page.

• In the fall of 2003, we introduced the new TAs in our seminar on teaching college writing to the electronic portfolio process.  Their FYComp classes were used for the first semester pilot.
• We derived a rubric for scoring the portfolios from our outcomes statement and benchmarks.
• We collected electronic portfolios at the end of fall 2003

• We applied for membership in the first cohort of the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research (NCEPR), and we were successful.
  
• Our tech specialist fed the data into an Excel spreadsheet, so we could compare scores in different areas.
• The results have allowed us to declare that our data collection is both valid and reliable.
  
• After consulting with Kathleen Yancey at the NCEPR meeting about the importance of student agency and reflection, we made a drastic revision of the electronic portfolio project, as well as the FYComp curriculum in fall 2004.
• We began asking the new TAs in our program (a captive audience, since they must take our pedagogy seminar) to create and revise their own electronic teaching portfolios over the course of their first year of teaching.  This strategy has several benefits:
• They must work alongside students to create an eportfolio.
  
• They focus their energies on reflecting on and improving their own teaching.
• They have a portfolio that they can easily share with future employers.
• Based on comments from the Holistic Scoring Team, we revised the scoring sheet to achieve a balance between what our outcomes require and what we can reasonably be expected to assess in student eportfolios.
• We saw the fantastic work that the TAs were doing with their electronic teaching portfolios, and this reinforced our belief that this is a better final project than a term paper, because it meets professional development needs. 
• Our electronic portfolio RA collected qualitative and quantitative data from the previous year's new TAs about their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of their own portfolios, their students portfolios, and their teaching of the electronic portfolio.  View some of the results here.
  

• The Provost and Assesment offices have asked us to consider ways to expand the eportfolio project across campus, and perhaps to make it longitudinal. They are interested in using it to assess writing and technology skills, as well as attitudes toward learning, across a larger cross section of NIU students.
  
• We now focus much more on reflection in both the portfolio and the syllabus.
• We're learning that for many students, the reflection in a webbed environment makes students much more aware of audience.
• We also found that a lot of students react negatively to the word "reflection," but not as negatively to the same assignment when it is called a "reaction" or "progress report."

• Developing outcomes and assessment has sparked discussion: more than ever, FYComp faculty are talking to each other about why and how we teach what we teach, and what students take away from our classes.
• We hold electronic portfolio and technology workshops several times a year.
• Electronic portfolios have become an integral feature of the articulation/calibration and program retreat sessions we require all staff to attend.
  
• To a modest degree, the pilot assessment encouraged the teachers in the program to buy in to the idea that all students should be able to demonstrate a common set of skills at the end of our classes.  So, rather than lockstep the program with a single syllabus, we can insure consistency and teach to our strengths.
• We are receiving recognition on campus and nationally for following best practices in assessment.  With authentic assessment measures in place, we are more and more confident that outside accreditation bodies will be satisfied, if not impressed, with our efforts to use assessment and the feedback loop to improve student learning.
• NIU has remained an integral member of The National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research.
• The university has continued to support the project, as we have begun to demonstrate that our eportfolio assessment gives us information to improve the program for students.