Readings: Portfolios and Assessment
Assessments are good on judging where your students are and what the teacher still needs to cover, but does it help the student assess himself? Do any students go back through a paper and try to determine what they did wrong or do they just look at the grade? Most students just look at the grade and maybe read the teacher comments. I teach math, and very few students ask me why they missed a problem. Some will go back through and see what they did wrong for the next exam, but not very many. A porfolio would force them to assess themselves. They would be involved in the process of picking which assignments would be in their portfolio, therefor wanting to know what they did wrong so they can inprove on future assignments.
5 comments:
This is what makes portfolios so powerful...it's about changing the culture of school...making it about learning rather than grades. Often students don't go beyond the grade they get because they don't see a reason to. The class moves on to the next unit or activity and this one is left behind. By making reflection a part of the assessment we force students to go back to their work and show them that we really do intend for them to make use of the information they learned.
Peer review would work well in that students could evaluate and give feedback on eachother's work.
Students tend to listen to their peers more anyway.
I've had similar problems where students don't care about what they did wrong. Adam is right. If we give them reason for going back to correct their work, they would hopefully understand the importance of it and take more pride in what they do.
More than assessing their own work, I love that portfolios are the gift that keep on giving. Students tend to forget about work once it's done and handed in. When you gather work pieces over time, students reflect on it as the remember completing the assignment and then again when they must write about what they learned from it or why they enjoyed it. Finally, the hope is that when kids present their portfolio to their parents, once again they are being introspective about the assignments inside. Without the process involved, all of the papers that were collected would otherwise just simply be forgotten.
I agree! a portfolio is a power self evaluation tool. It forces students to reflect and in some cases re due a artifact. I find more authentic learning happens when this is done.
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