  
On
Portfolios and Resumes:
Evidence of Student Achievement, Passports to
the Future
Can
you imagine an artist trying to convince you to
buy a painting by showing you a test he took on
“The Impressionist Movement”? Of course
not! You would want to see his work. Portfolios
in education are adapted from the visual and performing
arts traditions, in which they serve to showcase
artists' accomplishments and personally favored
works. Portfolios are purposeful collections of
student work that exhibit the student's efforts,
progress, and achievement in one or more areas.
They are valued as assessment tools because they
reflect classroom work and can be integrated into
the curriculum. Unlike separate tests, they supplement
rather than take time away from instruction. Moreover,
many teachers, educators, and researchers believe
that portfolio assessments are more effective
than "old-style" tests for measuring
academic skills and informing instructional decisions.
Click here
for more information and here
for additional resources.
More
recently, the electronic posting of complete portfolios
of student work has been gaining greater currency.
From a pedagogical standpoint, the chief advantage
of posting student work and portfolios on the
web is that is allows for feedback from the community
– the global community. Dr. Alan November
is a national advocate for using technology to
enhance teaching and learning and speaks frequently
about the value of publishing student work on
the web. “Kids feel involved and committed
to their work when they publish it, and the Web
allows kids the opportunity to publish to a worldwide
audience.”
Click here
for more information.
What
are the advantages of using electronic portfolios?
Researchers at the University of Delaware identify
the following advantages to using an electronic
medium:
-
It fosters parent involvement.
-
It motivates students by allowing them to display
their work to a wide audience.
-
It provides for feedback from a broad spectrum
of readers, including experts in the field who
may be located at great distance from the school.
-
It fosters discussion on student performance
among teachers who may be located in different
departments.
-
It allows for exhibition of "benchmark"
performance, thus fostering achievement of high
standards.
-
It makes portfolios readily accessible.
-
It allows for storage of multiple media, including
videos and soundtracks.
-
It makes portfolios easy to upgrade.
-
It allow for cross-referencing of student work
produced across disciplines. With integrated
projects, the same work is often used to meet
requirements in several classes. Paper and pencil
portfolios would require that copies of the
same work would be filed under multiple headings.
Using electronic portfolios, it is possible
to create meaningful links between all work
that is presented.
For
more information, including “how to”
guidelines for setting up electronic portfolios.
See Google
and search on “Portfolios”.
Finally,
a student’s resumé is a written summary
of his or her accomplishments (which can also
be posted and/or submitted electronically!) Resumé
development is an extremely useful process to
help students find the threads and patterns in
what they have done over multiple years. For the
resumé, students have to identify the skills
they have used, the environments they have worked
in, their personal successes and their contributions.
Many work-based learning programs ask that students
prepare a resumé to give to a prospective
internship host. Many colleges also now require
resumés as part of the college application
process, to illustrate what students have done,
in addition to what they know.
Click
here
for resumé guidelines, including sample
resumés for students. In addition,
California
Career Planning Guide includes questions to
prompt career self-assessment, resumé examples
and interview and job seeking tips.
Resumés,
along with portfolios, videos, transcripts, skill
certificates, letters of recommendation from counselors
and internship supervisors, thank you notes from
community-based organizations, and even yearbooks,
provide graduating seniors with a compendium of
tangible evidence of work well done. They also
reflect a wealth of memories created, and of dreams
to be realized. Let us ensure that the learning
is rich, that the memories are beautiful, and
that the dreams are boundless.
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