Portfolios are collections of students' work over time. A portfolio often documents a student's best work and may include other types of process information, such as drafts of the student's work, the student's self-assessment of the work, and the parents' assessment. Portfolios may be used for evaluation of a student's abilities and improvement.

In recent years, portfolios of students' performance and products have gained impressive degrees of support from educators, who view them as a way to collect authentic evidence of children's learning. For many early childhood educators, portfolios are an attractive alternative to more traditional assessment approaches. Often, however, teachers raise important questions about what portfolios contain, what benefits they will bring to the classroom and the children, and how they can be managed.

What do portfolios contain? Grosvenor (1993, pp. 14-15) lists three basic models:

• Showcase model, consisting of work samples chosen by the student.
• Descriptive model, consisting of representative work of the student, with no attempt at evaluation.
• Evaluative model, consisting of representative products that have been evaluated by criteria.

DeFina (1992) lists the following assumptions about portfolio assessment:

• "Portfolios are systematic, purposeful, and meaningful collections of students' works in one or more subject areas.
• Students of any age or grade level can learn not only to select pieces to be placed into their portfolios but can also learn to establish criteria for their selections.
• Portfolio collections may include input by teachers, parents, peers, and school administrators.
• In all cases, portfolios should reflect the actual day-to-day learning activities of students.
• Portfolios should be ongoing so that they show the students' efforts, progress, and achievements over a period of time.
• Portfolios may contain several compartments, or subfolders.
• Selected works in portfolios may be in a variety of media and may be multidimensional." (pp. 13-16)

What benefits can they bring?
Teachers who have experience with portfolio assessment report that it complements such developmentally appropriate curriculum and instruction as whole language, hands-on approaches, and process mathematics. It also allows them to assess children's individual learning styles, enhances their ability to communicate with parents about children's learning, and helps to fulfill professional requirements of school and community accountability (Polakowski, 1993). Implemented well, portfolios can ensure that the focus and content of assessment are aligned with important learning goals.

How can they be managed?
The planning, collecting, storing, and interpreting of authentic information on children's progress over time is time consuming. Many teachers are initially hesitant or resistant to use portfolio assessment because they fear that adding it to their existing responsibilities may prove overwhelming.

Teachers who have made the transition from traditional assessment to portfolio assessment advise that it requires a refocusing, not a redoubling of teacher effort. Since the kinds of materials collected are typical classroom tasks, assessment and instruction are joined together with curriculum. Time spent in this kind of assessment, then, is not time taken away from teaching and learning activities (Polakowski, 1993; Tierney, Carter, & Desai, 1991).

Polakowski (1993, pp. 52-53) describes three management techniques she uses concurrently for instruction and individualized assessment:

• Teacher-directed, timed centers through which small groups of students rotate for equal amounts of time.
• Child-directed, timed centers that children choose for the allotted time.
• Child-selected, timed centers that include some "must do" tasks.

Using such techniques, a teacher is able to engage in one-to-one assessment conferences or instructional conversations and collect products for assessment purposes.

Student Portfolios

A method which can combine both informal and formal measures is portfolio assessment (e.g., Wolf 1989). This method is rapidly gaining in popularity because of its ability to assess student work samples over the course of a school year or even longer. For this reason a more detailed description of portfolios follows.

Portfolios provide an approach to organizing and summarizing student data for programs interested in student- and teacher- oriented assessments. They represent a philosophy that views assessment as an integral component of instruction and the process of learning. Using a wide variety of learning indicators gathered across multiple educational situations over a specified period of time, portfolios can provide an ecologically valid approach to assessing limited English proficient students. While the approach is not new, portfolios are useful in both formative and summative evaluations, which actively involve teachers and students in assessment.

Portfolios are files or folders containing a variety of information that documents a student's experiences and accomplishments. The type of information collected for a portfolio can consist of summary descriptions of accomplishments, official records, and diary or journal items. Summary descriptions of accomplishments can include samples of the student's writing; artwork or other types of creations by the students; and testimonies from others (e.g., teachers, students, tutors) about the student's work.

Formal records typically included in a portfolio are scores on standardized achievement and language proficiency tests; lists of memberships and participation in extracurricular clubs or events; lists of awards and recognitions; and letters of recommendation.

Diaries or journals can be incorporated in portfolios to help students reflect on their learning. Excerpts from a diary or journal are selected for the portfolio to illustrate the students' view of their academic and emotional development.

Valencia (1990) recommends organizing the content of the portfolios into two sections. In the first section, the actual work of the students, or "raw data," is included. The information in this section assists the teacher to examine students' ongoing work, give feedback on their progress, and provide supporting documentation in building an in-depth picture of the student's ability. The second section consists of summary sheets or organizational frameworks for synthesizing the student's work. The information summarized in the second section is used to help teachers look systematically across students, to make instructional decisions, and for reporting purposes.

One major concern in using portfolios is with summarizing information within and across classrooms in a consistent and reliable manner, an issue discussed below.

Guidelines for Using Portfolios in Bilingual Education Evaluations

As part of the bilingual education evaluation, the portfolios can be quite useful. They can:

• be used to meet many of the bilingual education evaluation requirements;
• involve both formal and informal assessment methods;
• offer a comprehensive view of students' academic achievement and linguistic proficiency;
• provide more detailed information on those aspects of students' performance which are not readily measured by traditional examining methods;
• reflect the taught curriculum and individual child's learning experiences;
• encourage teachers to use different ways to evaluate learning;
• document the student's learning and progress; and
• help teachers examine their own development and skills.

Although the shape and form of portfolios may change from program to program, the real value of a portfolio lies in three areas. In the first area, portfolios have the potential to provide project teachers and students with a rich source of information to understand the development and progress of project students and to plan educational programs that enhance student learning and "showcase" their achievements. In the second area, portfolios allow for reporting in a holistic and valid way. The information gathered in a portfolio is taken from actual student work and assessment focuses on the whole of what a student learns, not on discrete and isolated facts and figures. In the third area, formal and informal data can be used in a nonadversarial effort to evaluate student learning in a comprehensive and authentic manner.

Although portfolio assessment offers great flexibility and a holistic picture of students' development, several technical issues must be addressed to make portfolios valid for bilingual education evaluations. These issues are summarized in three organizational guidelines which are based on current research and instructional practices in education (Au, Scheu, Kawakami, & Herman 1990; Jongsma 1989; Pikulski 1989; Simmons 1990; Stiggins 1984; Valencia 1990; Wolf 1989).

1. Portfolios Must Have a Clear Purpose

To be useful, information gathered for portfolios must reflect the priorities of the program. It must be kept in mind that the purpose of a bilingual education program evaluation stems from the goals of the actual program. The first critical step, then, is to identify and prioritize the key program goals of curriculum and instruction. In developing goals for portfolio assessment, it will be helpful to review (a) the state's current language arts and bilingual curriculum guidelines, (b) the district's or state's standardized achievement and language proficiency tests, and © the scope and sequence charts of the reading and literacy materials that will be used with the students.

Note that the goals of a program should be broad and general, not overly specific, concrete, or isolated lesson objectives. For example, a goal may be written as "To learn reading comprehension skills," or "To write fluently in English." If goals are too specific, portfolios can get cluttered with information that may not be useful to the student, teacher, administrator, or evaluator.

2. Portfolios Must Interact With the Curriculum

This issue also is known as content validity. It is important that the information in portfolios accurately and authentically represent the content and instruction of the program. Content validity can be maximized by making sure portfolios contain (a) a clear purpose of the assessment, (b) a close link between the behaviors or products collected and the evaluation goals, © a wide variety of classroom exercises or tasks measuring the same skill, and (d) a cross-check of student capabilities based on both formal tests and informal assessments.

When deciding on the type of assessment information to include in the portfolio, existing instructional activities should be used. Most likely, the information will be appropriate for portfolios. For example, one of the goals in the Kamehameha Elementary Education Program (KEEP) in Hawaii is to increase students' interest in reading and expand their repertoire of book reading. To determine to what extent this goal is achieved, teachers use a checklist to examine students' reading logs. The logs include a list of the titles and authors of the books students have read. With this information, teachers review each student's list in terms of level of appropriateness, genres read, and book preferences. Students also are asked to include dates the books were read in order to determine the number of books read over specified periods of time. The information thus obtained is then summarized in the checklist and used to monitor and report on students' learning as well as to improve instruction.

3. Portfolios Must Be Assessed Reliably

Reliability in portfolios may be defined as the level of consistency or stability of the devices used to assess student progress. At present, there are no set guidelines for establishing reliability for portfolios. The major reason is that portfolios, by their nature, are composed of a broad and varied collection of students' work from oral reading, comprehension checks, and teachers' observation notes to formal tests of the students' achievement or proficiency. Equally important, large- scale portfolio assessment has only recently been investigated as an alternative device in educational evaluation and research (Brandt 1988; Burnham 1986; Elbow & Belanoff 1986; Simmons 1990; Wolf 1989).

However, there are several criteria which are recommended in estimating the reliability of portfolios for large-scale assessment. These criteria apply both at the classroom level and at the grade level. Teachers and administrators must, at a minimum, be able to

• design clear scoring criteria in order to maximize the raters' understanding of the categories to be evaluated;
• maintain objectivity in assessing student work by periodically checking the consistency of ratings given to students' work in the same area;
• ensure inter-rater reliability when more than one person is involved in the scoring process;
• make reliable and systematic observations, plan clear observation guidelines;
• use objective terminology when describing student behavior;
• allow time to test the observation instrument and its ability to pick up the information desired;
• check for inter-rater reliability as appropriate;
• keep consistent and continuous records of the students to measure their development and learning outcomes; and
• check judgments using multiple measures such as other tests and information sources.

"...portfolios become each student's story of who they are as readers and writers, rich with the evidence of what they are able to do and how they are able to do it. Each portfolio is a collection of each student's best work."

"Portfolios allow teachers to get to know students-as readers, writers, thinkers, and as human beings."

1. Arranging all your pieces from most to least effective, including all evidence of the writing process behind each final draft.
2. Reflect on your two best works, and on a separate sheet(s) of paper for each piece, answer the following questions. Place this evaluation of your process and product in front of each final draft when completed.
   • What makes this your best (second best) piece?
   • How did you go about writing it?
   • What problems did you encounter?
   • How did you solve them?
   • What goals did you set for yourself?
   • How did you go about accomplishing them?
3. On a single sheet of paper at the front of your portfolio, answer these two questions.
4. What makes your most effective piece different from your least effective piece?
5. What are your goals for future writing?