Portfolio assessment
المؤلف:
Winnie Cheng & Martin Warren
المصدر:
Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Assessment
الجزء والصفحة:
P203-C18
2025-07-05
503
Portfolio assessment
An important feature of online Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication which epitomizes OCLA is portfolio assessment, which contributed 60% towards the final subject grade. The primary aim of the portfolio-based tasks was for the students to show their understanding of and to consolidate the concepts taught in the units of the WebCT learning materials and to show their ability to apply what they have learned to real-life situations, through analyzing naturally-occurring data using pragmatic and intercultural communication theories, making suggestions to improve communication in those contexts, and reflecting on and discussing their experience in applying pragmatic theories in real world contexts. The secondary aim was for the students to learn and work in groups through critically reviewing and discussing the peers' data analyses and giving them useful feedback for improvement. Group work, which tends to be less popular among students due to its greater demands on initiative, time and dependence on others, has been found to be effective in online courses when group work is integrated with assessment and examinations (Mason, 2001).
Throughout the semester, students worked online in groups of four completing assignments from which they compiled a portfolio. The portfolio was individual work. Students could work on as many unworked examples included in each unit as they wished. They posted the drafts of their work online to show their group members, who would read them and give critical feedback on the appropriacy of analyses and interpretations and so generate further discussion.
Figure 3 shows a typical forum discussion task in Pragmatics through which students show effective application of subject knowledge.
Figure 4 shows a task in Intercultural Communication.
At the end of the course, each student finalized the discussed examples in each unit and selected finalized examples to go into the portfolio, justifying their inclusion. Reeves and Okey (1996) have found that when students make decisions on the content of a task, a project or an exercise, their motivation and acceptance of the assessment will be increased because the students feel a sense of ownership of a task, and this in turn can strengthen the authenticity of an assessment.
Another piece of work to include in the individual portfolio is a reflective text about online collaborative learning and assessment experiences. To summarize, the portfolio contained:
1. A selection of finalized assignments with related group discussions.
2. Evidence that peer discussions and reviews were fed into the students' revisions of their assignments. (If peer input was not incorporated, the rationale for this had to be clearly explained).
3.Evidence of students taking part in critically discussing and reviewing the draft assignments
posted by group members; and
4. A reflective text with high quality (200-250 words) based on the experience of online collaborative learning and assessment.
الاكثر قراءة في Teaching Strategies
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