Thursday, October 22, 2009

The DEBATE

At SF State, we are approaching assessment with a multiple strategies.
Recently, there has been a lot of discussion re: an article: The Limitations of Portfolios (10/16/09)
October 16, 2009
Inside Higher Ed

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/10/16/shavelson

Richard Shavelson, Stephen Klein and Roger Benjamin write that "Electronic collections help show the range of students' work, but are not standardized or scalable enough to be used for broad assessment purposes."

The reactions to the article are really worth reading as are AAC&U President's Carol Schneider's response here: http://blog.aacu.org/index.php/2009/10/19/the-proof-is-in-the-portfolio/

Our response? Assessment need not be an "either/or" between testing or portfolios. We are addressing the "scalability" issue through the use of "tagging", wherein students can tag artifacts that map to course, dept., institutional and national learning outcome/goals. We no longer feel that there need be a dicotomy between ePortfolio and Assessment systems, as tagging can address both needs.

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