Portfolios Matter: What, Where, When, Why and How to Use Them

Luke Lawson is a teacher and administrator in Vancouver, B.C.

An ongoing challenge in education is assessment. How do we evaluate a
student’s ability and progress? The authors provide real-life and
often shocking examples of how students, as they move from grade to
grade or school to school, can have their marks change radically because
of differing teacher interpretations of progress and assessment.

Easley and Mitchell present the portfolio as a means of levelling the
assessment playing field. The portfolio, they write, “is a carefully
designed collection of work that provides a picture of what a person
(the student) knows or can do,” while student portfolios “are
selections of work samples, collected over a period of time

and used to represent the student’s achievements and efforts.” The
reader is shown how to implement portfolios in a series of brief yet
informative chapters. A particularly enlightening section titled
“Sharing the Portfolios: Conferencing” describes how students can
take ownership of their portfolios and provides methods for presenting
them.

This book will serve a valuable resource and starting point in
implementing portfolios, although educators should be aware that they
can be time-consuming to track and may loose their effectiveness in the
higher grades.