LAP Code: No.

of Hours: 3 hours/meeting
LAP Subject Title: Teaching Strategies for Elementary Science

LAP-21
Assessment Strategies for Science
(Physics, Earth and Space Science)
A. Topic Outline

Content
Unit Learning Objectives Activities Assignment
Standard
Unit 4: LAP 21: -To explain the purposes of using portfolio. Memory
Designing -To discuss the elements of a portfolio. Recall
Learning - To distinguish among the types of portfolio;
Portfolios -To discuss guidelines when using portfolio
assessment; and
-To design a portfolio assessment for
elementary science.

B. Introductory Activity: Analyzing Concepts. 10 points). Use short size bond paper for your answer.
What can you remember whenever you hear the word portfolio? Have you experienced
preparing a portfolio before? If so, what were the items you included in your portfolio? Why did you
include such items?

C. Abstraction
A portfolio is a collection of material designed to showcase a student’s best work or to show the
student’s growth and development over time (for example, over a term or a year). Entries to the
portfolio may be linked to learning targets and nay include self-reflections on the student’s own work
(Murchan & Shiel 2017).
The term portfolio derives from the collections that photographers, models and assemble to
demonstrate their work. In the classroom, portfolios have the same basic purpose: to collect the
students’ output to show their work and accomplishments over time. Portfolios do not contain
haphazard, unrelated, collections of a student’s work. They contain purposefully selected examples of
work. Depending on the purpose of the portfolio, these examples of work may demonstrate the
achievement of important learning goals, or they may document growth over time. The contents of a
portfolio should be closely related to the teacher’s learning objectives and should provide information
that help the teacher form decisions about student learning.
Portfolio entries may be annotated by the student, allowing the teacher to track student
thinking and explanations as well as progress over time. Portfolios may also be used as a basis for
diagnosing a student’s learning difficulties in a subject area.
A portfolio can be made of many different student performances or of a single performance for
example, a multi-focused writing portfolio might contain writing sample, list of books read, journal
entries about books read, and description of favorite poems. Conversely, a single-focus portfolio might
contain multiple pieces of the same process or product., such as a portfolio containing only book
reports, only written poems, or only physics lab reports.
In general, portfolios contribute to instruction and learning in many ways. These are discussed
by
Russell & Airasian (2012) in their book “Classroom assessment Concepts and Applications”.
 Showing the student’s typical work
 Monitoring the student’s progress and improvement over time
 Helping the students self-evaluate their work
 Helping the teachers judge the appropriateness of the curriculum
 Grading the students
 Reinforcing the importance of processes and products in learning
 Showing the students, the connections among their processes and products
 Focusing on both the processes and final product of learning
A portfolio is not a repository into which all of the work produced by a student is stored. Instead, a
portfolio has a defined, specific purpose that reflects the learning objectives. This clearly defined
purpose focuses the samples of work are collected in the portfolio. Too often, the teachers defer the
question of the portfolio’s purpose until after the students have collected large amount of their work in
their portfolios. At the time the teacher is likely to be confronted with the question of what to do with a
vast, undifferentiated collection of student information.
An electronic portfolio or e-portfolio is a collection of the student’s work, usually saved on the web.
Evidence of learning may include texts, electronic files, images, multimedia. Such a portfolio allows the
students to share their work with the teachers, the parents, the administrators, and other students.
 OPOL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Learning Activity Package
Education Department

Perhaps the most important contribution that portfolios provide for learning is that they give the
students and their parents or guardians a chance to revisit and reflect on the products and processes a
student has produced. Collecting the pieces of the student’s work in a portfolio retains them for
subsequent student review, reflection, demonstration, and grading. With subsequent guidance, the
students can be encouraged to think about and compare their work overtime. For instance, the students
can be asked to reflect on these questions.
 Which of these portfolio items shows the most improvement and why?
 Which did you enjoy most and why?
 From which did you learn the most and why?
 In what areas have you made the most progress over the year, and what was the nature of that
progress?
Consequently, portfolio allow the students to see their progress and judge their work from the
perspectives of time and personal development.
A portfolio assessment is a type of performance assessment and thus depends on the same four
elements that all types of performance assessment require: 1) a clear purpose; 2) appropriate
performance criteria; c) suitable setting, and 4) scoring performance. Several questions must be
answered in assessing and developing portfolios.
Portfolios can be assessed using checklists, rating scales, or scoring rubrics. They also allow for self-
assessment, as the students review their own work and comment on it, drawing on a rubric developed
by the teacher. Where possible, a rubric can be developed by the teacher and the students.

Purpose of Portfolios
The items that go into a portfolio, the criteria used to judge the items, and the frequency with
which items are added or deleted from the portfolio all depend on the portfolio’s purpose.
If a portfolio is intended to show a student’s best work in a subject area, the contents of the
portfolio would change as more samples of the student’s performance because available and as less as
good ones were removed. If the purpose is to show improvement over time, earlier performances would
have to be retained and new pieces would have to be added.
Given the many and varied uses of portfolios, the purpose is a crucial issue to consider and define in
carrying out a portfolio assessment. It is important to determine the purposes and general guidelines for
the pieces that will go into the portfolio before starting the portfolio assessment. It is also critical that all
pieces going into a portfolio be dated, especially in portfolios that aim to assess the student’s growth or
development. Without recorded dates for each portfolio entry, it may be impossible to assess growth
and improvement.
To improve student’s ownership of their portfolio, it is useful to allow the students to choose
least some of the pieces that will go into their portfolios. Some teachers develop portfolios that contain
two types of pieces: those required by the teacher and those selected by the student. It is also
important that all student portfolio selections be accompanied by a brief written explanation of why the
student feels that piece belongs in his/her portfolio. This will encourage the student to reflect to the
characteristics of the piece and why it belongs in the portfolio.
Performance Criteria
Performance Criteria are needed to assess the individual pieces that make up a portfolio.
Without such criteria, assessment cannot be consistent within and across portfolios. The nature and
process of identifying performance criteria for portfolios are the same as that for checklists, rating scales
and rubrics.
If the students’ portfolios are required for all teachers in a grade or if portfolios are to be passed
on to the students’ next teacher, it is advisable for all teachers who will use information provided by the
portfolio to cooperate in formulating performance criteria.
It can also be valuable to allow the students to help identify performance criteria used in
assessing the contents of a portfolio because it can give the students a sense of ownership over their
performance and help them think through the nature of the portfolio pieces they will produce.
Beginning a lesson with a discussion of what makes a good report, oral reading, science lab, or sonnet is
a useful way to get the students think about the characteristics of the process or product they will have
to develop.
Setting
In addition to a clear purpose and well-developed performance criteria, portfolio assessments
must consider the setting in which the students’ performance will be gathered. While many portfolio
pieces can be gathered by the teacher in the classroom, other pieces cannot. When portfolios include
oral speaking, science experiments, artistic productions, and psychomotor activities, special equipment
or arrangements may be needed to properly collect the desired student performance. Many teachers
underestimate the time it takes to collect the processes and products that make up portfolios and the
management and record keeping needed to maintain them.
An important dimension of using portfolios is the logistics of collecting and maintaining the
students’ portfolios. Portfolios require space. They have to be stored in a safe but accessible place. A
system has to be established for the students to add or subtract pieces of their portfolios. Maintaining

PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 14
 OPOL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Learning Activity Package
Education Department

portfolios requires time and organization. Materials such as envelopes, crates, tape recorders, and the
like will be needed for assembling and storing the students’ portfolios.

Scoring
Scoring portfolios can be a time-consuming task. Not only does each individual portfolio piece
have to be assessed, but the summarized pieces must also be assessed to provide an overall portfolio
performance.
Consider the difference in managing and scoring portfolios that contain varied processes or
products compared with portfolios that contain examples of a single process or product. The multi-
focused portfolio provides a wide range of student performance, but at a substantial logistical and
scoring cost to the teacher. The single-focused portfolio does not provide the breadth of varied student
performances of the multi-focused portfolio but can be managed and scored considerably more quickly.
When the purpose of a portfolio is to provide descriptive information about student
performance (e.g., to pass information onto the next school year’s teacher), no scoring or
summarization is needed. The contents themselves provide the desired information. However, when the
purpose of the portfolio is to diagnose, track improvement, assess the success of instruction, encourage
the students to reflect on their work, or grade the students, some form of summarization or scoring of
the portfolio pieces is required.
The purpose of assessing an entire portfolio, as opposed to the individual pieces, is usually
summative-to assign a grade. Such holistic portfolio assessment requires the development of a set of
summarizing criteria.
Individual portfolio pieces are typically scored using checklists, rating scales, and rubrics. It is not
always the teacher who assesses the pieces. It is desirable and instructive to allow the students to self-
assess some of their portfolio pieces to give them practice in critiquing their own work with respect to
the performance criteria. This approach encourages student reflection and learning. Below is an
example of performance criteria in assessing individual portfolio using checklist, rating scale, and rubric.
Assessing performance, product and portfolio has both advantages and disadvantages. The
teacher needs to think of the best opportunities when to do such activities in class. The list below
presents the advantages and disadvantages of assessing performance, product and portfolio according
to Russell & Airasian (2012).

Advantages Disadvantages
Most disadvantages associated with
performance; product, & especially portfolio
assessments involve the time they require:

Conduct student self-assessment products and To prepare materials, performance criteria, and
performances scoring formats
Conduct peer review of products and To manage, organize and keep records
performances
Integrate assessment & instruction For teachers & the students to become
comfortable with the use of performance
assessments & the change in teaching & learning
roles they involve
Give the students ownership over their learning To score and provide feedback to the students
and production.
Report performance to the parents in clear,
descriptive terms
Provide concrete examples for parent
conferences

Lastly, to improve validity and reliability of performance assessments, here are some guidelines
suggested by Russell & Airasian (2012).
 Know the purpose of the assessment from the beginning.
 Teach and give the students practice in the performance criteria.
 State the performance criteria in terms of observable behaviors and avoid using adverbs such as
appropriately, correctly, or well because their interpretation may shift from student to student.
Use overt, well described behaviors that can be seen by an observer and therefore are less
subject to interpretation. Inform the students of these criteria and focus instruction on them.
 Select performance criteria that are at an appropriate level of difficulty for the students. For
example, the criteria used to judge the oral speaking performance of third year debate students
should be more detailed than those used to judge first year debate students.
 Limit performance criteria to a manageable number. Many criteria make observation difficult
and causes more errors that reduce the validity of the assessment information.

PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 14
 OPOL COMMUNITY COLLEGE Learning Activity Package
Education Department

 Maintain a written record of the students’ performance. Checklists, rating scales, and rubrics are
the easiest methods for recording the students’ performance on important criteria, although
more descriptive narratives are often desirable and informative. Voice or video recorders may
be used to provide a record of performance, so long as their use does not upset or distract the
students. If a formal instrument cannot be used to record judgments of the students’
performance, then informal notes of strong and weak points should be taken.
 Be sure the performance assessment is fair to all the students.
D. Application: Situational Analysis /Designing Portfolio (20 points):
1. What are the advantages of allowing the students to assess their own portfolio?
2. Can the students go to their portfolio at any time, or will the teacher set aside a special time
when all the students can modify their portfolio?
3. If the portfolio is intended to show growth, how will the order of the entries be kept in
sequence?
4. How does a student’s portfolio help the parents in guiding the student?
5. Design a portfolio you want your students to prepare in one of your classes. Give the
purpose, contents, guidelines for preparation, and criteria or rubric for assessing the
students’ portfolio.
6. Prepare an e-portfolio applying the knowledge and skills you learned e.g., physics,
mathematics, history, information technology, communication). Make a rubric to help you
score the portfolio.
7. What is the most important consideration when designing a portfolio assessment?

PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 14