The Florida State University's e-portfolio program, FSU Career Portfolio (Lumsden and others, 2001), is a student-managed portfolio system that students and alumni can use to reflect on and integrate their learning experiences and document and showcase their skills and accomplishments (Reardon, Lumsden, and Meyer, 2005). Not only has this program…

This article connects teachers' experiences of reflective school portfolio development to the idea of teachers' knowledge communities, the different groups and individuals with whom teachers negotiate meaning for their stories of experience, lived and told, and re-lived and re-told, over time. The reflective analysis makes the case that the…

To adequately prepare preservice teachers to implement inclusive classrooms, teacher preparation programs must encourage professional interaction, collaboration, and knowledge about inclusion. Although some of these skills can be presented in coursework, prospective teachers must be provided with opportunities to practice these skills in classroom…

Research has called for courses to be developed that provide preservice teachers opportunities to actively engage their pedagogies under construction in order to effectively translate their beliefs into sound instructional practice. This article presents research that examined how a service-learning writing tutoring program affected preservice…

Electronic portfolios allow students to include video, images, hyperlinks, and audio, along with written texts, to create varied and comprehensive representations of what they have accomplished. Such collections of information also change the ways that teachers and students choose to present themselves and the ways that we read these presentations…

Two inherently contradictory forces are pushing for reform in portfolio assessment. On the one hand there is a felt need for creating more rigid standards that operate to promote uniformity of ratings in appraisal practice to certify achievement. However, on the other hand, critical questions are being raised about separating acclaimed portfolio…

This paper excerpts a report based on the National Academy of Education's "Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do," which summarizes research on learning, teaching, and teacher education. In this article, the authors discuss how teachers can prepare to become highly qualified and how they can acquire…

This article focuses upon the use of the portfolio as a tool to assess professional performance in beginning classroom teachers and in special education applications. An Oregon pilot study, the Beginning Teacher Assessment Model (BTAM) for elementary teachers in their second or third year in the classroom, is described. The BTAM relies extensively…

This presentation addresses issues of faculty evaluation in the university context and the effective use and usefulness of portfolios. A section on portfolio content validity asks about the right things to include and briefly discusses scholarship, teaching, and service components. A section on criterion-related validity asks whether rival…

This practicum was designed to develop performance-based assessment tools to document language arts achievement for use in eighth-grade language arts classes. Two eighth grade language arts classes (55 students) participated in the program for an entire school year, maintaining a writing portfolio and a record-keeping portfolio. A video portfolio…

A portfolio is a meaningful collection of student work that tells the story of student achievement or growth. There are two basic reasons for doing portfolios--assessment or instruction. Benefits for using portfolios in instruction include the development of students self-reflection, critical thinking, responsibility for learning, and content area…

Interest in assessment of young children increased after readiness testing abuses in the 1980s. The pressure of demonstrating educational accountability through children's standardized test performance increased the use of skills-driven curricula. It also created an inappropriate learning environment in which readiness tests were used to remove…

The works reported in this book represent a second phase to a 2-day summer conference that focused on assessment in mathematics and science classrooms. This book presents research and findings of a subset of the conference participants who investigated a self-selected aspect of assessment in their educational environments. Action research was the…

The "Education for the Future Initiative" is a national, privately-funded program initially sponsored by the Telesis Foundation and recently joined by Arthur Andersen & Co. to help schools undertake continuous improvement. The Initiative has pioneered a framework for school improvement in the form of a school portfolio. This document offers a…

In addition to student assessment, many educators are now using portfolios to document and evaluate their own growth and development and to showcase the learning taking place in their classroom. This guide, in workbook format, explains why portfolios are essential to educators' professional development, outlines a professional development plan,…