What is a Portfolio?
A “portfolio” is a selection of student work that they have chosen and evaluated as their best work, or as representative of their development over time. By making students responsible for collecting, organizing, drafting, revising, proofreading, and/or reflecting on their work, portfolio assignments engage them in the learning process and afford them an opportunity to share with the instructor their own reasons for investing in the project of the course.
Portfolios are especially common in the arts and for courses in which students conduct a range of writing assignments. (“Exam wrappers,” increasingly common in STEM fields, might also be considered a form of portfolio.) Portfolios can be assigned for semester-long courses, or for longer term capstones like certificate programs, across a range of fields.
Why use Portfolios?
Portfolios can be assigned as an alternative to a traditional final exam or paper, and can be especially effective at meeting some or all of the following goals:
- encouraging student agency;
- generating insights into each student’s engagement in their own learning;
- prompting students to reflect on and understand understand their own development over the course;
- inspiring students to identify future goals for continued learning beyond the course;
- providing students the opportunity to select and develop work that they can use beyond the classroom, such as samples for graduate school applications or future employers.
“Portfolio culture” honors both processes and products, and encourages students to prepare materials for the job market / interviews, by encouraging a mindset of professionalism, rather than an “assignment mindset.” Portfolios encourage students to reflect on the amount of work they’ve accomplished over the course of a semester, and ideally, to learn about themselves and their own learning strategies as much as they’re learning new content/skills.
What does a Portfolio contain?
A portfolio typically includes three key components:
- Samples of student work distributed across the term
- Reflections on the work samples
- A professional re-presentation of the work samples