Rationale: Why Portfolio Assessment?
“But I forgot what she went on to. She had to move on, she
explained later. There were other stories to cover, other skills and
techniques to learn, and there was to be a test that Friday.”
-from “Dialogue with a Text” by Robert E. Probst
One of the best methods of evaluating the student’s understanding of the core curriculum components is to look at
student learning in terms of authentic assessment, a method of evaluation that examines performance tasks,
projects, and portfolios. The curriculum outlines a number of performance tasks, projects, and other activities that
may be included in a teacher's evaluation of student learning.
Portfolio assessment is a way of examining the student's ability to understand, to think, to reason, and to relate
what he has learned to his own life and to other learning situations. It requires intimate involvement on the part of
the student. Students must reflect, rethink and examine themselves as learners. The students themselves become
both teachers and learners, and the role of the ProTeam teacher becomes that of a facilitator for learning. Portfolio
assessment also makes it possible to monitor student progress over time with the evaluation component at the end
of the module of study. The students become responsible for demonstrating their understanding of module goals
and objectives and begin to see the connectedness of what they are learning.
Portfolio assessment encourages creative and divergent thinking and problem-solving and ties classroom learning
to “real life” situations. It focuses not on recall and recitation but on ensuring that students know how to work with
information in developing understanding and solutions, demonstrating to students the generative power of
learning. It goes beyond the mimetic tradition of teaching in which the purpose of education is the transmission of
factual knowledge to the transformative tradition in which the purpose of education is, in terms of changes in the
learner, in areas such as attitudes, interests, understanding, and application. Rather than simply measuring
linguistic or logical responses, portfolio assessment allows for students to demonstrate a variety of intelligences,
including knowledge of self and others.
PROTEAM DREAMQUEST CURRICULUM
36