Design effective tasks for portfolio-based learning

Mueller (2018) asserts that the purpose of a portfolio should be made clear to students, as it influences the shape of the work they create for the portfolio. This will also help you to define the intended audience of the portfolio more clearly for your students. Making these factors explicit to students will help them see the connections in their learning. 

The following prompts may help you to establish the purpose of a portfolio in your subject:   

• What is the purpose of the portfolio in your subject? How does it help students achieve the intended subject learning outcomes?
• Who is the intended audience of the portfolio?
• What type of portfolio do you want students to develop?  
• How does it align with your subject learning outcomes? 

In addition to making the purpose and intended audience of a portfolio clear to your students, it’s also useful to communicate the benefits of portfolios. San Jose (2017) argues that students must be made aware of the benefits, both personal and professional, of a digital portfolio beyond their course requirements, to achieve engagement in the process. Consider developing a value proposition for portfolios.

Communicating the benefits of a portfolio could be framed around:

• gaining deeper learning through curating and reflecting
• gaining better understanding of themselves
• building a network and community by connecting with others who share their interests.

As many students may not be familiar with portfolio practice, consider providing examples of publicly available portfolios as inspiration for them. This will help students envisage how they could develop their portfolios.   

Examples can be sourced from public profiles and projects on the UTS Portfolium network. You could also source publicly available portfolios developed on different tools or platforms. 

Consider creating your own portfolio with the UTS Portfolium network to model this for your students. Doing this will give you the opportunity to explore the tool and better understand its features, so you will be well prepared to guide your students through the development of a portfolio. 

Many students will need help making the connection between their portfolio-based tasks/projects and their learning. To help them with this, setting clear expectations about the task (in Portfolium, these will most often be a project) is important from the onset. This in turn will help you and the students determine the kinds of artefacts they should include.

Ensure that you clearly communicate the requirements of a portfolio-based task, and how it relates to your subject or course learning outcomes.  These include:

• Who is the intended audience of the project?
• What is the ‘story’ that should or could be told, demonstrated, or communicated via a project?  Is the story about the student’s knowledge, skills, values, beliefs?
• What type of artefacts would be appropriate?  How should be selected or curated, and from where?  Is there a set of criteria to help students make an appropriate choice? 
• What format the artefacts should take (or if there is a choice)?
• What should support the artefact(s), or how should the artefact(s) be communicated or reflected?
• If a reflection or commentary is required for the selection of artefacts, where should this be included within the structure of the Project?
• What type of feedback would be or could be required from peers, or from the teaching staff?
• How public or private should the Project be?   Are there any personal, confidential or sensitive information within any of the artefacts which require strict privacy settings?  Consider academic integrity as well. 

A major component of developing a portfolio is the process of reflection.  The role of reflection in the learning process has been well documented.  However, meaningful reflection does not just happen – intentional strategies are required to realise the transformative nature of portfolios (Eynon, Gamino & Torok, 2014).

Rodgers (2002) offers four criteria to characterise reflection, distilled from John Dewey’s work on reflection in the early 20^th century:

1. Reflection is a meaning-making process.
2. Reflection is a systematic, rigorous and disciplined way of thinking.
3. Reflection needs to happen within a community.
4. Reflection is influenced by attitudes.

The second criteria, that reflection is a systematic, rigorous and disciplined way of thinking, can be a useful lens to help you structure portfolio-based tasks that helps students reflect with purpose. Rodgers (2002) outlines a systematic approach to reflective thinking, which can be summarised in these 4 steps: 

1. Live the experience.
2. Describe the experience.
3. Analyse the experience.
4. Decide next steps or actions (which can include experimenting with new ideas). 

Students sometimes complete assignments without reflecting on feedback that their teachers have provided, resulting in a missed opportunity for them to consciously improve their skills and for in-depth learning (Chang, 2019). Asking students to reflect on a completed assignment and record this reflection as a project in Portfolium allows them to document the development of their knowledge and/or skills over time. The example below outlines a reflective portfolio-based task based using Rodgers’ criteria of reflection as a systematic and disciplined way of thinking.

Consider designing portfolio-based tasks as formative tasks and therefore, not marked. Persson, Kvist and Ekelin (2018, as cited in Chang, 2019) found that students may adjust their reflections to reflect their perceived needs of their teacher, and thus suggested that reflective tasks should be part of formative assessment so that students feel safe to be honest about their reflections.