Thanks for your interesting and provocative (as usual) reply. I just want
to share a quote from an article from Chronicle of High Education that I
think is relevant:
"...a man waiting for a bus cannot help but notice the young mother next to
him, beaming as she coos to her baby. The man leans over for a peek. "What a
beautiful little girl!" he exclaims. "Oh, this is nothing," answers the
mother, "you should see her photographs."
...Whether they realize it or not, many academics and administrators share
the young mother's confusion between reality and surrogates for it. The
mother believes that photographs are more important than how her baby looks
in real life..."
"Reliance on Test Scores Is a Conspiracy of Lethargy"
By WENDY M. WILLIAMS, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Date: 10/10/97,
Section: Opinion, Page: A60
I like the word "surrogate." I think that serving multiple purposes, it is
not so much a distortion of the reality or a mediation of the reality but a
boundary object for negotiation among communities (e.g., academics,
administrators, politicians, parents).
What do you think?
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Barowy [mailto:wbarowy@lesley.edu]
> Sent: Friday, February 26, 1999 12:26 AM
> To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: just a little more portfolio assessment
>
>
> At 2:59 PM -0500 2/25/99, Eugene Matusov wrote:
> >
> >So, you believe that in principle the portfolio assessment can
> be done "in
> >the right way."
>
> Ouch! Suppose we put on our activity theory hats for a moment - the
> artifacts that the students produce in learning activity are material
> traces of that activity - some measures of what a student did, alone and
> possibly with others. In creating a graph, for example, if the object of
> the activity is the subject learning, with the goal of understanding a
> relationship between the two things that are graphed, then the
> graph is the
> material means through which that action is accomplished. But that is not
> enough - we are interested also in what the students' have internalized
> through this process. So a portfolio that is only a simple collection of
> artifacts is what I would call superficial - it is a measure of
> performance
> but does not alone indicate competance. For a richer description, we need
> more. Asking the student to provide some explanation of the
> artifacts, for
> example, selecting and relating their artifact designs to the learning
> goals is one way to take the process a level deeper.
>
> Sorry to be so elementary, but this is the first time I have translated
> portfolio assessment into activity theory language. I have to keep it
> simple.
>
> Unlike normed tests, however, the student is able to bring their
> creativity
> to bear both in the original production of artifacts, in their selection
> for inclusion to the portfolio, and then in explanation of them.
> First the
> portfolio, being a selection that the student makes of his/her work,
> engages the student in making a decision about what best meets their
> understanding of the learning goals. If the selection is a graph, then the
> graph might be constructed in several different ways, with some
> ways better
> than others for helping to see a mathematical relationship between two
> things. Artifacts like the graph emerge out of something the student is
> doing while learning, as is its selection, so as Eugene notes, the
> assessment is integral to the learning process. The reflective component,
> in which the student demonstrates in some way how they see the graph as
> re-presenting a relationship between the two things, is also up to the
> students creativity. A student may choose to express their understanding
> in words, in diagrams of various kinds, pictures, photos...
>
> If the portfolio is to provide some indication of a zoped, then the
> activity unfolds differently. Perhaps the teacher may constrain the
> choices the students have to demonstrate their performance, by
> providing or
> suggesting specific re-presentational forms. Either way, portfolio
> assessment in this way is not completely divorced from practice, but grows
> out of it. One purpose in the design of portfolios as an assessment is
> its use to mediate parent conferences, which seems a nice way to link home
> and school activity.
>
> That is not to say that many of Eugenes concerns are addressed. Although
> there seems to be some ways of staying in contact with the context of
> practice, and maintaining high validity by linking the construction of
> portfolio artifacts to the learning goals through the actions of the
> learner, we still have not addressed the other bugaboo of assessments -
> reliability. I have not demonstrated in any way that portfolio
> assessement
> can be made as reliable as, say, normed tests. Said another way, it is
> difficult to make a comparison in how two students would perform under
> identical conditions based upon portfolio assessments from two different
> schools. I am not prepared to address reliability issues, but I do see
> reasons to think hard about them.
>
> The points Eugene makes about divorced assessments are things that I agree
> with in general 1) can inhibit learning 2) situated in power negotiation
> 3) require care in administration
>
> >
> >Which "the community" are you taking about. I see a communal
> plurality with
> >fuzzy boundaries torn by power struggle for domination and resources.
> >Assessment is money!
>
> Eugene is absolutely right. I'm glad he picked up on my sloppy
> use of the
> word 'community'. There are something like 90 different
> definitions of the
> word. Arrghh.
>
> And thanks Peg for the URLs to your Learning Record web pages - they came
> in as I am about to finish for the night. I'll check them out. And if
> having a cold in the middle of a nor'easter is a measure of the winter
> season, is not enough, the darn sudafed's keeping me awake.
>
> Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
> Technology in Education
> Lesley College, 31 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
> Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
> http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
> _______________________
> "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
> and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
> [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
>