Writing Portfolios in the Classroom

Policy and Practice, Promise and Peril

Robert Calfee, Pamela Perfumo, Robert Calfee, Pamela Perfumo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780805818369
• eBook ISBN: 9781136488344
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume presents chapters by researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who study the impact of classroom portfolios in the assessment of writing achievement by elementary and middle grade students.

The focus throughout the volume is on the tension between classroom assessment and externally mandated testing. It presents the efforts of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to understand the impact of classroom portfolios for the assessment of writing achievement by elementary and middle grade students. Under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Writing, the editors conducted a national survey of exemplary portfolio projects, arranged for a series of "video visits," and held several working conferences. The result of this work is a broad-ranging tale: the aspirations of teachers and administrators to move the machinery of schooling in the direction of more authentic and engaging tasks, the puzzlement of students when they realize that the assignments are real and that the teacher may not have a "right answer" in mind, and the tensions between ivory-tower ideas and everyday classroom practice.

Divided into four sections, this research volume:
* provides a historical perspective, develops the conceptual framework that serves as a background for many activities described throughout, and discusses numerous practical issues that confront today's researchers and practitioners;
* views the phenomenon of writing portfolios through a variety of broadview lenses such as teacher enthusiasm, student reflection, assessment tension, the portfolio as metaphor, and the locus of control;
* conveys important conceptual issues with a balance toward pragmatics; and
* offers unique insights from the perspective of one individual who serves as scholar, researcher, and teacher.

PART ONE

AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT OF CLASSROOM WRITING

CHAPTER ONE

Classroom Writing Portfolios: Old, New, Borrowed, Blue

Robert C. Calfee
Stanford University

Sarah Warshauer Freedman
University of California, Berkeley

Catchy labels are attention-grabbers. Whoever first expressed the idea of portfolios of student work might have conjured up images of capable professionals opening impressive binders filled with polished displays of art, a far more appealing vision than dreary worksheets and multiple-choice tests.¹ Writing instruction seems especially suited to portfolio assessment and programs have sprung up around the country based on the metaphor. Like most metaphors, this one must be handled with care. Students are not professionals, and placing assignments into a manila folder does not guarantee a basis for assessment.

The chapters in this volume explore the current status of the portfolio concept—theory, research, and practice. The focus throughout the volume is on the tension between classroom assessment and externally mandated testing. This chapter places the writing portfolio in historical context (old), examines the mesh between portfolios and recent developments in cognition and learning (new), looks at the linkage between portfolios and other innovative ideas (borrowed), and then reminds the reader of the especially tumultuous state of today’s American public schools (blue). We conclude the chapter by proposing a conceptual framework for the role of portfolios in the assessment of student writing, our effort to provide a coherent linkage among the chapters in this volume.

THE OLD

They say that WYTIWYG—“what you test is what you get.” For more than 50 years, testing has come to mean the standardized, group-administered, multiple-choice test. Critics have argued that we have gotten low-level outcomes, rote memorization, and mindless practice. Originally designed for cheap and efficient selection of soldiers during the World Wars, the multiple-choice technology came to play an increasingly important role in public education from the 1950s onward. The concurrent emphasis on efficient management was well-served by standardized testing; it satisfied accountability requirements, allowed placement of students with special needs, and provided data to evaluate competing programs. Standardized tests meshed with the concept of behavioral outcomes, and textbook publishers began to align their materials with objectives-based scope-and-sequence charts. Alignment came into its own with the evolution of criterion-referenced tests explicitly designed to determine curriculum goals (Bloom, Hastings, & Madaus, 1971; a counterargument was made by Glaser, 1981). Textbook publishers incorporated worksheets and end-of-unit-tests into their materials, linking external tests to the daily routines of classroom instruction.

Writing instruction was not easily assessed by the multiple-choice technology, and so writing fell by the wayside. Literacy became identified with reading, more specifically with an image of reading as the acquisition of basic skills. As for writing, what should be taught? Many of the answers took a negative slant. Studies appeared to show that teaching grammar was not only boring but ineffective. How should writing be taught? Paraphrasing model paragraphs and copying summaries from book covers was not very inspiring. How should writing be assessed? The obvious answer was that teachers should grade student compositions. Although standardized reading tests could boast reliabilities in the .9 range (high levels of item consistency), research showed that teachers disagreed on writing performance, with reliabilities around .5 (low inter-rater consistency). Surveying the situation in America’s schools during the 1970s, Applebee (1980) found that relatively little time was spent on writing instruction, most student compositions were a few sentences or perhaps a paragraph, and the first draft was generally the only draft.

THE NEW

The founding of the Bay Area Writing Project in 1972 and the National Writing Project in 1974 began to dramatically alter this state of affairs. The Project brought together classroom teachers who were interested in the teaching of writing to a summer institute where they could share their knowledge, practice their own writing, and talk about how to revitalize the field of composition instruction. From the outset, the project, drawing on the experience of successful teachers and the research of the time (Britton, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975; Calkins, 1986; Emig, 1971; Graves, 1983; Perl, 1979; Sommers, 1980) emphasized the concept of writing as a process, the notion that students need to be taught to think through their ideas as well as revise their writing, and that teachers needed to provide space and time for the thinking and reworking of ideas that meaningful writing requires. The Writing Project also pushed for the assessment of whole pieces of writing rather than piecemeal multiple-choice snippets, and led the way in popularizing holistic scoring for state, district, and school-level assessment programs (Myers, 1980).

Following the summer institutes, participants served as teacher-consultants in local school districts, passing on their knowledge to other teachers through formal projects and informal interactions. At Writing Project sites, the yearly cycle just described quickly created a network of teachers committed to the importance of writing, confident in their professional status, and convinced of the importance of teacher-based assessment. These teachers depended on neither textbooks nor tests, and were rather distrustful of external mandates.

The Writing Project is now active in more than 150 sites in every state and several foreign countries. During its growth over the past 20 years, the model has sustained the centrality of the classroom teacher, and the stimulation generated by professional exchanges. It has offered teachers a unified voice for speaking to the importance of writing in the literacy curriculum.

In the late 1970s, policymakers hurried to the front of the parade. Legislators throughout the nation mandated writing tests as part of state assessments. To be sure, these on-demand tests bore little resemblance to the practices being promulgated by Writing Project teachers. Process writing emphasized student-initiated topics, whereas mandated tests employed predetermined prompts. In process writing, student work was scaffolded by instruction, whereas mandated tests were standardized with no support allowed by the teacher. Process writing allowed students adequate time to plan, compose, and revise, whereas on-demand tests were restricted to a single session and a prescribed amount of time. Process writing was a social event, whereas state testing placed the individual on his or her own. In process writing, evaluation was a collaboration between student and teacher, whereas mandated tests were scored by external judges using predetermined rubrics. Nonetheless, the introduction of mandated writing tests meant that many more teachers began to pay attention to writing—especially teachers at the “test” grades (usually fourth and eighth grades, along with high school juniors or seniors).

The most recent episode in the history of writing assessment in this country emerged in the 1980s under a variety of labels—authentic assessment, performance-based testing, portfolios. The initiating goal in this movement was the urge to link assessment policies with what many teachers saw as a more authentic curriculum—in both reading and writing. What should be taught as reading? From the perspective of a 1960s objective-based curriculum, the answer was basic skill in decoding and answering questions. The Whole Language movement of the 1980s (Goodman, Goodman, & Hood, 1989) emphasized instead the reader’s engagement in a story. Remembering the facts about The Diary of Anne Frank was part of the process, but reliving the experience was the more critical outcome. What should be taught as writing? An objectives-based answer emphasized the surface features of performance; grammar and spelling could be quickly and reliably judged from a fill-in-the-blank exercise. Writing Project teachers talked instead about purpose, audience, voice, development, and coherence.

The language of this movement had a novel ring to it, but it also incorporated classical elements. Reading instruction began to emphasize critical analysis. The Greek kritikos was a person chosen to judge merits and faults, to get to the root of the matter. Attention switched from decoding to comprehension. Speed and accuracy in oral reading are no guarantee of genuine understanding from this perspective. Comprehend comes from the same root as prehensile, with the sense of grasping, struggling, wrestling, “getting it” by rebuilding a passage. The focus turned to the student’s reactions, reflections, and personalization of a piece of literature, a classical concept.

Writing instruction also employed elements of the classical rhetoric. Planning and development were important elements in writing, as important for the teacher as it was for the final product. Students once more had to explain what they were doing and why. Ideas like thematic development and persuasive argumentation returned to the curriculum. The ancient Greeks would recognize the concepts.

The emphasis on comprehension and rhetorical coherence was supported by an emerging line of innovative research on situated, social, and strategic cognition as the foundation for powerful learning. A mouthful, to be sure. The behavioral learning of the 1940s and 1950s was concrete and observable, attractive both scientifically and administratively. Functional relations between stimulus and response sufficed for this model, which provided powerful techniques for behavior control. The cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s moved inside the mind, the computer as metaphor, to explore intellectual capabilities and thought processes. Information from the sensory channels entered short-term memory, where it was translated for storage in long-term memory. Problem solving, linguistic competence, semantic networks—these concepts reopened the study of the mind (Berliner & Calfee, in press).

By the 1980s, the strengths and limits of the computer metaphor had become apparent, and a new revolution emerged in our understanding of thought and learning. Human beings are not machines. We are social, we communicate, we are adaptive, and we can plan. Computers, in contrast, do not perform any of these activities unless a human being has programmed them to do so. They do not communicate unless they are connected by cables. They work the same no matter where they are plugged in. We now have a rich understanding of social cognition, of group thinking, and of the effect of context on these processes. But despite more than a decade of research studies spanning a variety of disciplines to explore these concepts, these ideas have yet to take root in today’s classrooms.

What might it mean for curriculum, instruction, and assessment to be situated, social, and strategic? It certainly means more than simply exposing students to textbook content and then testing whether the content has been stored in memory. Situated learning happens when learning is connected with prior experiences and beliefs. If learning is not situated, it is less likely to have any genuine impact on students’ perceptions and understandings. Most graduates know that the earth turns relative to the sun, causing sunrise and sunset; they have studied this topic in textbooks and tests from fourth grade on. Nonetheless, students see the sun set in the west in the evening, and cannot imagine standing on a globe that is actually rotating away from the sun. They study literary works that convey messages of enormous thematic import—The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Freedom Road—but appear to leave these studies affected little by the thematic values. They memorize textbook accounts about the hazards of poor diet, inadequate exercise, and drugs like tobacco and alcohol, but statistics and anecdotes suggest that these learnings are not thereby connected to daily reality for many people. School is one thing, the real world is another. It is easy to administer a multiple-choice test to assess content coverage, but judging the degree of situated learning is more difficult.

Social learning means working together toward genuinely shared ends. More is needed instructionally than occasional cooperative learning sessions. Learning in groups can be more effective and more satisfying than working alone. We sometimes must work as individuals, and too many cooks can indeed spoil a soup. But the democratic principle of e pluribus unum is more than an ideal; today’s world has moved beyond the assembly-line era to a time when our lives as citizens and workers require teamwork. Yesterday’s norms depend on examinations in which an individual’s accomplishments are judged by how well he or she can work in isolation in competition with others. In fact, the student’s ability to get along with thirty other individuals is critical if the classroom is to promote learning, and this capability is equally important in the world beyond school. Report cards sometimes address these issues by including a behavior category, but this is typically used to identify troublemakers rather than peacemakers. There are no formal tests of getting along together.

Finally, cognitively strategic learning emphasizes the importance of transfer to new situations. The only constant for tomorrow is change, and today’s schooling is worthwhile only as it prepares graduates for circumstances that cannot be predicted, that builds on content, but that goes on to explore broader meanings and deeper extensions. Strategic learning encompasses three distinctive principles: it is active, it is reflective, and it is expansive. Students can learn by rote practice, but they are unlikely to learn about learning unless they are invested in a purposeful endeavor. A youngster may take a test or even write a passable essay about the causes of the Civil War, then wipe the slate clean a day later. Being able to explain yourself is the essence of reflectiveness; “Why?” is largely neglected in classroom discourse. Authentic assessment asks the student to “show your work.” Learning is expansive when it moves beyond the immediate context for application in new and unpredictable situations. In life outside of schools, the answers can seldom be found at the back of the book. For instance, how does analysis of the Civil War help understand the several other civil wars going on around the world today? The daily newspapers suggest that policymakers do not have clearcut answers about either causes or remedies in this matter, and so the question is a real one. Judging students’ responses to the question is not easily relegated to a Scantron machine.

Only recently have the innovative concepts of cognitive learning begun to influence assessment, and even now only indirectly. Some of the groups hard at work on authentic assessment build on cognitive foundations (e.g., Resnick, 1987). At the level of classroom practice, however, teachers are predominately oriented toward activities more than concepts, toward demonstrating mastery of learned tasks more than transfer to new situations. Performance is more important than thinking, doing more than explaining.

THE BORROWED

Central to all of the movements just mentioned—whole language, process writing, authentic assessment—has been the establishment of professional communities, the borrowing of ideas among teachers. The conceptual foundations sketched provide a starting point for a common language, in the sense that they seem to share a common ideology, partly grounded in Deweyian philosophy, partly based on cognitive psychology. Unfortunately, the various movements use different words, so that connections are not easily established.

The problem is that education is a practical enterprise, and as such requires a blending of ideas, engineering, and art. Scientists and scholars can contribute to the ideas, but it is in the field of practice that the engineering and art must be worked out. In an earlier time, the technology was simple and did not require professional judgment. Most schools in the U.S. could follow a factory model, each laborer at his or her individual workbench, teachers isolated within their individual classrooms. No need for the continuing dialogue that is the hallmark of other professions. Education that guarantees a high level of intellectual and social development for all students cannot be prepackaged, but calls for professional decision making, which in turn requires a professional language as the foundation for interaction.

And so it is understandable that where programs like whole language, process writing, and authentic assessment are having substantial impact, teachers have managed to network with one another. Sometimes the linkages are school-wide, more often they take shape as mentor or “buddy” systems. The school seems the natural unit for establishing these connections, but cross-school alliances have a unique potential as seen in the National Writing Project and other professional networks.

Several observers have commented on the value of local ownership, the idea that teachers must develop their own understanding of the concepts and practices. This strategy carries the risk of reinventing wheels, but we think that it makes sense for several reasons. First, if today’s teaching rested on a more clearly established professional foundation, then teachers would encounter preservice experiences in thinking through comprehending and adapting new ideas at a conceptual level during their college careers and induction into the vocation. In fact, teaching during the past 50 years has been “managed,” in the sense that teachers are generally told what to do. Now, when suddenly expected to make significant decisions on their own initiative, teachers are understandably taken aback and reluctant. It is only through collegial opport...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Authentic Assessment of Classroom Writing
• Part II: Guideposts from Research
• Part III: The View from the Field
• Part IV: The Potential of Writing Portfolios
• Author Index
• Subject Index