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

As part of the project we also developed a manual for students on how to populate their own portfolios; a report to other professional schools on the experiences and results of the pilot process; and a compendium of policies, procedures, and organizational issues surrounding the use of ePortfolios.

Findings

In reviewing our notes, discussion from feedback sessions, and observations of the students while they worked with the application, we began to identify recurring issues and themes. For us, it was helpful to systematically examine the ePortfolio as a teaching method in terms of student level data, curricular level data, and technical issues.

Student Level

We examined whether the ePortfolio process itself had the same integrative effects as paper portfolios. The general sentiment of students' feedback seemed to indicate that this was the case. In reflecting on the ePortfolio seminar, students shared the following.

* "Helped me organize my thoughts/strategies by tying together seemingly disparate bits of social work school experience."

* "In retrospect I'm more concerned with professional self-assessment as a personally enriching activity."

* "It is a good class for helping to make sense of all [my] Other classes, undergrad experience, jobs, and fieldwork experience. The process helps to make sure [my] MSW experience [was] more cohesive."

However, our primary focus was on the electronic aspects, and that feedback was more along the lines of this comment: "I like the guidance on how to create artifacts and [philosophy] statement, but the ePortfolio itself, the finished product, is sort of ugly." In addition, "Students like me will possibly have a harder time ... with the on-line process. But, I learned eventually." Others simply found the ePortfolio application difficult to handle. Nonetheless, those aspects did not seem to interfere with the actual portfolio process, and that was reassuring.

Most interesting was the lack of connection between how we designed the initial framework to hold the portfolio contents (i.e., artifacts) and how the students wanted the framework to be organized. Most of our curricular initiatives took place in our practice area courses. So the initial artifact placeholders were titled "children and youth," "mental health," "aging," and so forth. The students, instead, requested a structure organized around specific social work roles (clinician, evaluator, advocate, etc.), because that is how they present themselves to prospective employers. This was an unexpected finding and something we would not have discovered if we had not engaged in this proof-of-concept research.

Curricular Level

A desire shared by all the students was to have a more transparent relationship between class assignments, objectives to be learned, and competencies to be achieved. As a faculty we all tacitly assumed this to be occurring, but the portfolio process revealed that it happened in a very uneven fashion. In some classes the linkages were readily observable, in others they were present but students had difficulty discerning them, and in still other situations there were no links between the classroom and the field.