Using electronic portfolios to promote reflective thinking in language teacher education

This study aimed at investigating the role of electronic portfolios in fostering pre‐service teachers’ reflective thinking. The research was conducted with pre‐service English language teachers enrolled in a practicum course in an undergraduate teacher education programme in Turkey. The data were collected through e‐portfolios and interviews. The findings revealed that e‐portfolios gave participants a sense of ownership, fostered reflecting thinking, supported collaboration and allowed them to make connections between theory and practice. With the on‐going nature of the e‐portfolio, participants had the chance of developing and reviewing their portfolio artefacts whenever and wherever they wanted. Therefore, electronic portfolios allowed teacher candidates to reflect more on their own work and thus engage in on‐going professional development.     

Weblog-based electronic portfolios for student teachers in Taiwan

This paper explored how the use of weblogs within the portfolio framework affected portfolio production and development for student teachers, and how the weblog-based electronic portfolio (WBEP) shaped student teachers’ reflective practice during the student teaching practicum. The individuals participating in this study consisted of 31 elementary school student teachers from a national university’s teacher education program in Taiwan. Qualitative data analysis revealed that about half the participants’ WBEP maturation level were at Level 2, the Curriculum Vitae WBEP. The two most prominent features of the WBEP platform on participants’ reflective practice were personal editorship and dialogues with others. Additionally, blog publicity promoted mandated dossier-like portfolios with which to evaluate performance with respect to external evaluation requirements. Thus, the reflective themes of most WBEP contents were rather uniform in the study.     

The introduction of electronic portfolios to teach and assess english as a foreign language in Taiwan

TechTrends - The use of electronic portfolios to teach and assess EFL affects both teachers and students who are accustomed to traditional methods of teaching and learning English in Taiwan. This...     

The introduction of electronic portfolios to teach and assess english as a foreign language in Taiwan

Conclusion The use of electronic portfolios to teach and assess EFL affects both teachers and students who are accustomed to traditional methods of teaching and learning English in Taiwan. This new innovation also stimulates teachers and students to think about ways to connect their work, their school and the island communities of Taiwan. Ultimately, it will help teachers and students to look beyond the Taiwan community to interact with a more globalized world community.     

Using portfolios: a way to improve performance and self-esteem with poor readers?

The main questions answered by the intervention of using portfolios during reading and spelling lessons were: do poor readers in the intervention condition perform better and do they show a higher self-esteem than poor readers in the control condition? A post-hoc design was used to compare an intervention group with a control group. The independent variable was using portfolios as part of reading and spelling instruction. The dependent variables were literacy skills, conceptual knowledge on reading and writing, and self-esteem. Intelligence score was used as a covariable. The study included 92 students from grade 3 (six to seven-year-olds) from two schools providing regular education. The results on the quantitative measurements indicated that using portfolios did not improve performance with reading and spelling and self-esteem. The qualitative findings with respect to the 14 poor readers of the participating subjects revealed that their reading performance and self-esteem decreased further in both conditions. It is argued that teachers should explicitly use portfolios as a way to evaluate and discuss performance with poor readers so as to better understand the student's level of instruction and feelings of competence, and actually apply that knowledge during instruction.     

Developing digital portfolios: investigating how digital portfolios can facilitate pupil talk about learning

The Digital Portfolio Project at Newcastle University aimed over one year (2002/2003) to support teachers in producing, storing and accessing assessment portfolios of learner’s work using information and communications technology (ICT). This paper draws on evidence of pupil views collected as part of 14 teacher‐led case studies. The teachers all approached the task of developing digital portfolios in different ways and the variety of end products was large; however, the common result was the value placed on using the portfolio as a tool for reflection and celebration of children’s learning. As part of the data collection teachers were encouraged to gather pupil views about the digital portfolio learning process. These comments provide an interesting and surprisingly analytical perspective of the research and learning process not commonly considered in the academic community. This paper documents the pupils’ views and uses them to review the strength of the digital portfolio process and the benefits of using it in the primary classroom.     

Academic misconduct in teaching portfolios

Within academia, clear and standardised communication is vital. From this point of departure, we discuss the trustworthiness of teaching portfolios when used in assessment. Here, misconduct and fraud are discussed in terms of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism, following the literature on research fraud. We argue that the portfolio’s unclear academic status and confusing standards makes it difficult to define misconduct. We see a risk that the practice of portfolio writing for assessment can lead to misconduct, including downright lies about accomplishments. We conclude that the trustworthiness of teaching portfolios is a responsibility for the academic community as a whole.     

Knowledge management for multi-assessment portfolios

This paper presents the results of a project conducted under the Greenfield Coalition concerning the development of an e-portfolio (a digital version of portfolios) assessment system. The goal of the system is to support student, course, instructor and curriculum assessment to enable continuous improvement of the educational process through the development of portfolios for each of them. In designing this system two areas of concern were identified: the development of an architecture for an easily maintainable system for structuring assessment portfolios and whether the system would be easy enough for first-year students to use. Two experiments were conducted to resolve these issues and verify that the architecture under development is proceeding appropriately. Toassure that the resulting system can properly structure and display the portfolios, a set of student and course data was entered into the system. Pages demonstrating the students' progress toward a course objective were automatically generated. To affirm that the mechanism identified for collecting the data is appropriate, a year-long digital portfolio collection was undertaken. Students submitted their coursework and supporting documents to a web server and used it to create their portfolio. Student reaction to the system was favourable. This project leads us to believe that the suggested architecture holds promise and merits continued development.     

Teaching portfolios and university culture

The teaching portfolio has been proposed as a useful management tool for monitoring and improving teaching. It is one of the accountability mechanisms that universities have introduced in a market‐oriented environment. However, there has been considerable resistance to the compulsory introduction of teaching portfolios from a wide range of teaching staff. This paper links research on staff practice with research on management practices and considers the impact that teaching portfolios might make on the university culture. Our analysis shows that although the development of an initial teaching portfolio within a mentoring relationship has value, the mandatory use of the multipurpose teaching portfolio described by Seldin is likely to impact adversely on the effectiveness of the organization in which its use is mandated.