[Portfolio] Follow Up to Recent Posts on Portfolios

Robert Squillace rs84 at nyu.edu
Mon Nov 2 10:34:09 PST 2009


Speaking as an administrator in a Liberal Arts program currently engaged in a major assessment effort (and also sitting on the University's assessment committee), I just wanted to note that I see a major difference in using an LMS to help assess a pre-professional curriculum as opposed to a liberal arts curriculum.  For pre-professional programs, the assessment measures can be pretty direct - if 90% of your students pass the brutal architecture certifying exam on the first try, for instance, it's clear you're doing a very good job.  Assessing the success of a liberal arts education is harder.  An LMS can, of course, allow you to disseminate rubrics more readily than you could without an LMS configured for that purpose, and rubrics do allow a program to determine what students are learning without quite so many variations in interpretation as you'd find between the grades instructors give in their individual courses based on their individual senses of what should count.

But the central goal of liberal education is to develop self-understanding (and understanding in general), which is extremely hard to measure; it's the very thing that can't be reduced to rubrics, which of necessity focus on achievements that different observers can agree are demonstrably present in the piece(s) of work being assessed.  You can assess whether students can tell the difference between poems by John Donne and Rumi, but it's much harder to find a concrete manifestation of whether you have given them the ability meaningfully to encounter a poem on their own.  You can, of course, develop some sort of program-wide exit assignment that, e. g., asks students to analyze a poem they've never read before, but all that will tell you is how successful they have been in adopting the rhetorical stances of your program, not the extent to which your program has influenced the way they think in situations when they know they are not being directly observed and judged.

I see great potential for using an LMS with a robust portfolio tool to develop substantially different and possibly far superior means of assessment for liberal arts programs.  Rubrics are applied to the end product of learning on the assumption that the process of change that led to those final products, the growth of the student's mind, is not available itself for observation.  But with a strong portfolio tool, one in which students do not merely stockpile the precise items the program prescribes but control the type of items they save and the manner in which they are presented, one might have a window into the development of each student's mind.  In order to configure an open-ended portfolio, students need to practice taxonomy, placing items in categories that reflect the way they think about the relations between them.  If such a portfolio is versioned and makes space for student reflection, it becomes possible to see how a student's way of thinking and modes of understa
nding grow (or fail to) over time; if such a portfolio is allowed to grow organically, the very sorts of items students choose to save and comment upon, the ways they choose to represent themselves, can tell a program a great deal about what is and is not having an influence on students over time, what is and is not sticking.  In other words, a program can look directly at how a student's work has changed over his or her time at the University, see both what they produced and what they thought about it at a metacognitive level, and get a sense of the real difference what they teach is making.  I think we've always wanted to see how students ways of thinking change over time; it was just never practical in a world of discrete courses in which the work of one term was basically wiped clean to start the next.

Anyway, Lucy Appert, Barbra Mack, and I, as well as many colleagues at NYU, are working along these lines, and would be curious to see what people think.

Yours,
Bob Squillace

Dr. Robert L Squillace
Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs
Liberal Studies Program
New York University
726 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003-9580
(212) 992-8735
rs84 at nyu.edu


Dr. Robert L Squillace
Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs
Liberal Studies Program
New York University
726 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003-9580
(212) 992-8735
rs84 at nyu.edu


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