Introduction

“Students become far more sophisticated and educated when they can organize their work into a portfolio that represents the quality of their learning in a course or college year. (…)The resulting portfolio may feature the student’s ‘best work’ or the ‘process’ the student is using to learn. ^[i]

The student portfolio is an ideal tool for assessing competencies^[ii]. It is widely used in pedagogical studies^[iii]. In recent years, it has come to be used in education at all levels and in all areas ^[iv]. The main benefits of portfolios are that they enable instructors to assess how well students have learned; they give students an opportunity to demonstrate that they have thoroughly learnt a subject, and to think about their individual learning processes; they increase students’ motivation to learn; they provide opportunities and data to assess their progress; and they make students responsible for the assessment process.

Our experience

Starting in 2002, we introduced student portfolios as a new element in the assessment process of our first-year course in wave optics for students studying optometry.

The main objective was to increase our students’ autonomy in their individual learning processes. We wanted to encourage a learning process that would be characterised by reasoning and reflection rather than being strategic and mechanical. The portfolio was intended to be used by the students to reflect the manner in which they learnt, what material they had really learnt, and what they still needed to focus on and how to go about doing it.

Implementing portfolios in our study consisted in having students compile a collection of all the work they had done over the course of the semester. Every student would have his or her own portfolio, which would contain items such as summaries of textbooks, the problems they had solved, their laboratory reports, online resources they had located and sketches. It was also to contain documents in which they expressed their reflections on their individual learning processes: how they studied, and weaknesses they could improve and strong points they could reinforce.

The portfolio itself was required to contain the following elements:

Even though the portfolio was given a clear structure, it need not be a form to be merely filled in. Improvisation must be made possible and creativity must be encouraged.

The assessment was carried out in three interviews over the course of the semester—a frequency that strikes a balance between a commitment to “continuous” assessment and a reasonable workload for the instructor. The quantity and quality of each student’s work was assessed. Furthermore, generic skills, such as the ability to synthesise information, the capacity to communicate effectively and to structure information were also evaluated.

Results and conclusions

The introduction of a portfolio in the assessment process of our course has proved to a very positive experience: students were motivated to work continuously and their individual learning processes have been enhanced, while instructors have come to know their students better and have shown a greater degree of confidence in the assessment process.

The portfolio was introduced gradually. The weight it carried in the final mark was initially 20% and has since been increased to 30%. A number of controls were established in the process, and as the evolution of the final marks over the last several years has not shown any critical variations (see fig. 1), we believe that at the very least the academic level of the course has been maintained. The correlation between the marks given to the portfolios and the final marks has proved to be quite good (see fig.2), and accordingly, the use of the student portfolio seems to be a useful tool for assessing students’ knowledge.

Figure 1.-

Evolution of final qualifications

Figure 2.-

Correlation between marks