Advantages of Portfolio

1. It is consistent with the theories of instruction and philosophies of schools promoting

students’ involvement in learning
2. It is an excellent way to document student’s development and growth over time.
3. It provides students the opportunity to have extensive input from the learning process.
4. It fosters a sense of ownership of the work and the skills in critical self-reflection and
decision-making
5. Portfolio contents may be used to illustrate the processes and procedures students
follow
6. It combines paper-pencil tests with performance and product assessments.
7. It promotes student self evaluation, reflection, and critical thinking.
8. It measures performance-based assessment from genuine samples of student work.
9. It provides opportunities for students and teachers to discuss learning goals and the
steps to achieve those goals in structured and unstructured conferences.
10. It enables measurement of multiple dimensions of student progress by including
different types of data and materials.

Disadvantages of Portfolio
1. Logistics involved in designing and maintaining a portfolio system may be overwhelming
with little or no support.
2. All stakeholders need training to design, implement, manage, and assess portfolio.
3. Portfolio is a new assessment strategy to most teachers, relative to previous
approaches, with many unresolved issues.
4. Gathering all the necessary data and work samples can make the portfolio bulky and
difficult to manage.
5. Requiring extra time to plan as assessment system and conduct the assessment.
6. Scoring portfolio involves the extensive use of subjective evaluation procedures, such as
rating scales and professional judgment; these limit reliability.
7. Developing a systematic and deliberate management system is difficult, but this step is
necessary in order to make a portfolio more than a random collection of student work.
8. Scheduling individual portfolio conferences is difficult and the length of each conference
may interfere with other instructional activities.

DEVELOPING PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT

1. Determine the curricular objectives to be addressed through the portfolio.

2. Determine the decisions that will be made based on the portfolio assessments.
3. Design assessment tasks for the curricular objectives. Ensure that the task matches
instructional intentions and adequately represents the content and skills students are
expected to attain.
4. Define the criteria for each assessment task and establish performance standards for
each criterion.
5. Determine who will evaluate the portfolio entries.
6. Train teachers or other evaluators to score the assessments. This will ensure the
reliability of the assessments.
7. Teach the curriculum, administer assessments, and collect them in portfolios or score
assessments.
8. As determined in step 2, make decisions based on the assessments in the portfolio.
Guidelines for Assessing Portfolio

1. Include enough documents (items) on which to base judgment.

2. Structure the contents to provide scorable information.
3. Develop judging and a scoring scheme for raters to use in assessing the portfolio
4. Use observation instruments such as checklists and rating scales when possible to
facilitate scoring.
5. Use trained evaluate or assessors.

Contents of Portfolio

1. Table of contents
2. Single best piece, which is selected by the students and can come from any class and
need not address an academic subject
3. Letter explaining the composition and selection of the best piece
4. Poem, short story, or personal narration
5. Personal response to a book, event, current issue, mathematical problem, or scientific
phenomenon
6. Prose piece from any subject area other than English or Language Arts.

Prepared by:

ALMIRA O. DOTE
BSED-QUALIFYING