The use of ePortfolios in evaluating the curriculum and student learning

Journal of Social Work Education, Fall, 2008 by Dale Fitch, Melissa Peet, Beth Glover Reed, Richard Tolman

STUDENT PORTFOLIOS (Campbell, 2004; Costantino & De Lorenzo, 2002; Lyons, 1998) have begun to receive increasing attention, not only in the higher education literature, but also within the social work profession (Cournoyer & Stanley 2002). Because portfolios can foster the integration of theory, action, self-reflection, group learning, and assessment--essential elements of professional education--they may enhance educational outcomes as students navigate their social work programs. Indeed, some emerging research in social work education suggests that portfolios can help students learn how to learn and to develop their identities as budding professionals (Alvarez & Moxley, 2004; Schatz & Simon, 1999; Schatz, 2004).

Portfolios are traditionally viewed as a personal collection of information and artifacts that describe and document a person's achievements and learning. The most common use of portfolios is to compile and demonstrate a person's work as part of an application process for employment or education. Increasingly, however, educators are focusing on portfolio-based learning and portfolio-based evaluation.

Electronic portfolios (hereafter ePortfolios) extend this concept by acting as a "content-management system" (Jafari, 2004, p. 40) that facilitates the process of collecting, reflecting on, sharing, and presenting learning outcomes and other professional accomplishments via a digital medium. Rather than merely changing the format of content (paper to digital), ePortfolios radically transform portfolios from a "thing" to a process or processes. The ramifications of this transformation recast earlier research findings and inform the design for ePortfolio systems in development.

This article presents a systematic review of the process we used to create an ePortfolio application within a school of social work. We describe our initial data demonstrating the usefulness of an ePortfolio infrastructure that not only facilitates and assesses individual student learning but also aids overall curricular assessment. Significantly, our ePortfolio design integrates curricular, cocurricular, and professional practicum experiences. We embed the presentation of our findings and experiences within existing literature and discuss our future plans based on our experiences thus far.

Literature Review

The use of portfolios has been discussed in the social work literature pertaining to professional development (Elliott, 2003), curricular assessment (Spicuzza, 2000), and integrating the classroom-field learning experience (Alvarez & Moxley, 2004; Risler, 1999; Schatz & Simon, 1999). Many disciplines have addressed practice competencies in the curriculum (see, for example, Edwards, 1987; Margolis et al., 2000; O'Sullivan & Greene, 2002; O'Sullivan, Reckase, McClain, Savidge, & Clardy, 2004; Volland, Berkman, Phillips & Stein, 2003;). In higher education the use of ePortfolios has been discussed as an aid to career development (Greenberg, 2004; Heath, 2002), a way to enhance learning experiences (Martin-Kniep, Cunningham, & Feige, 1998; Wolf & Dietz, 1998), and a way to assess student learning and curricular assessment (Ramey & Hay, 2003; Ring & Foti, 2003).

Specific to relevant learning theories, portfolio-based learning could be viewed as occupying the highest form of knowledge and skill integration (Anderson, Krathwohl, & Bloom, 2001) in that students would be reflecting on the development of all of their professional skills in the process of creating their emergent professional identity. Examples of this application of portfolio-based learning can be found in the existing portfolio research. Student feedback from the portfolio development process indicates that the procedure itself made them more aware of their own learning processes and how they needed to take control of their learning activities to make them more meaningful for personal and professional growth (Ashelman & Lenhoff, 1994; Wilcox & Tomei, 1999). In parallel, as faculty members review portfolios they also begin to have a metacognition of the curricular process and reflect on the curriculum with an eye toward needed curricular changes (Ashelman & Lenhoff, 1994). We do not suggest that these effects, linked to the social constructivist model of self-reflective activity (Alvarez & Moxley, 2004), are unique to a portfolio process; for students some of these experiences occur in field seminars or a capstone course, and for faculty they may occur in curriculum committees or faculty workgroups.

However, overall integration is unlikely in these settings alone, and the portfolio process may be a tool that can facilitate that practice.

Types of Portfolios

Although portfolio-based learning may be the motivation for some portfolio projects, there are many types of portfolios that may or may not incorporate aspects of that framework. Existing research has focused on the following types of portfolios.

* Assessment or evaluative. These portfolios are used to assess student performance in the program (Ashelman & Lenhoff, 1994; Brown, 2004; O'Sullivan et al., 2004; Spicuzza, 2000; Stern & Kramer, 1994) or in aggregate for curricular evaluation (Fitzsimmons & Pacquaino, 1994).