Questioning Assumptions about Portfolio-Based Assessment

Interest in and commitment to portfolios for assessing college writing have swelled enormously in the past decade and are still growing. In Using Portfolios, Pat Belanoff and Peter Elbow wrote extensively about the benefits portfolios brought to the freshman composition program they ran at SUNY-Stony Brook. Anson and Brown have written, in Large-Scale Portfolio Assessment in the Research University, about the efforts of faculty at the University of Minnesota toward large-scale portfolio collection at entry which, while they ultimately sank under the weight of campus-wide politics, inspired similar efforts at places such as the University of Alaska (Wauters). As the use of portfolios for purposes ranging from entry-level writing assessment (at Miami University: see Daiker) to campus-wide curriculum development (Larsen) becomes common, evaluation by portfolio method is increasingly accepted as an enriched evaluation and thus a better evaluation. Our own experience with portfolios at the University of Michigan (Condon and Hamp-Lyons) confirms that portfolio-based assessment does enrich the process of assessing writing; further, it enriches the process of teaching writing, of developing curriculum and faculty in a writing program, of collecting data about the program's effectiveness, and much, much more. The benefits of portfolio assessment are real, and the indications are that its potential has hardly begun to develop. We write, then, from the perspective of a commitment to portfolio assessment, but also from the perspective of teacher-researchers who seek to understand all we do, even when it is successful. A great deal is still unknown about what portfolios do and, perhaps even more interestingly, about the nature of the role and activities we, as teachers and readers, engage in during portfolio assessment. In order to explore some of the issues involved in how teacherevaluators use, perceive, and react to the portfolios they collect in their classes,

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