Understanding E-Portfolios

• E-Portfolios consist of digital collections of student works like essays, posters, photos, videos, and artwork.

Learning Theory Behind E-Portfolios

• E-portfolios align with social constructivism, where learning is most effective when students actively construct knowledge systems.
• Bass and Eynon (2009) state that e-Portfolios make "invisible learning" visible through critical reflection.
• Invisible learning involves the intermediate steps during learning and the learning that extends beyond cognitive to include affective, personal, and identity issues.
• Student-centered e-portfolios encourage engagement and motivation because learners freely choose artifacts and reflect on their learning process.

Types of E-Portfolios

• School-centered e-portfolios are used by schools for summative assessments.
• Learner-centered e-portfolios provide formative assessment to help learners self-assess.
• Assessment e-portfolios support the assessment of institutional/school outcomes for the school.
• Learning e-Portfolios are for learners to examine and reflect on their own learning.
• Career/transfer e-Portfolios showcase student achievements for employers or transfer institutions.

Best Practices for Using E-Portfolios

• Explain the benefits of e-Portfolios, such as deeper learning, better self-awareness, sharing with family/friends, and showcasing achievements.
• Establish clear expectations for what students should include in their e-Portfolios.
• Provide various examples of successful e-Portfolios like Inkless or Knowledge Integration.
• Scaffold student learning by starting with one artifact and reflecting on the challenges faced.
• Create and share your own e-Portfolio to demonstrate the challenges and benefits.
• Tie e-Portfolios to course assessment, acknowledging the time and energy students invest.
• Make it social by having students view and comment on each other's e-Portfolios in online forums.

E-Portfolio Assessment Rubric

• Purpose: Portfolios allows students to reflect on their education, with a statement of goals, philosophy, and showcasing of best work.
• Reflections: Portfolios to contain work examples like presentations, and documents with student reflections.

Key Takeaways

• Social constructivism involves learners constructing knowledge through social interaction.
• E-portfolio work is collaborative, involving co-constructing and reconstructing knowledge with teachers and classmates.

Assessment in the Affective Domain

• Affective domain covers growth in feelings/emotions/attitudes, while the psychomotor domain handles manual/physical skills.
• The three domains of learning are Knowledge, Skills, and Attitude (KSA).

Soft Skills in Affective Assessment

• Soft skills are non-technical skills related to workplace interactions and problem-solving approaches.

Categories of Soft Skills

• This includes social skills, self-management skills, academic soft skills, and approaches to learning.
• Social skills relate to how a student interacts with others, as observed by teachers and adults.
• An example is providing positive feedback, offering help, initiating interactions, and participating in discussions with peers.
• Self-management refers to self-regulation, like planning, focusing attention, reframing experiences, and using mental tools.
• Examples include cooperating, maintaining attention, respecting teachers/staff, and accepting rules.
• Academic soft skills are social and cognitive with roles independently in academic tasks.
• For example, working independently, finishing tasks, bringing materials, using study skills, and asking for assistance.
• Approaches to learning include student engagement, pleasure in learning, and anxiety about performance.
• This involves enjoying school, taking on tasks, having confidence, working hard, being enthusiastic/adventurous, and being involved in extracurriculars.

Taxonomy of Educational Objectives

• Taxonomy culled from Kratwohl's taxonomy of Affective Domain (1964).
• Receiving: Being aware or sensitive to ideas/material/phenomena and willing to tolerate them.
• This involves differentiating, accepting, listening, and responding.
• Responding: Being committed by actively engaging with ideas, materials, or phenomena.
• This involves complying, following, commending, volunteering, spending time, and acclaiming.
• Valuing: Being perceived as attaching importance to ideas, materials, or phenomena.
• This is shown through increasing proficiency, relinquishing, subsidizing, supporting, and debating.
• Organizing: Relating values to existing ones to create a harmonious philosophy.
• Examples include discussing, theorizing, formulating, balancing, and examining.
• Internalizing: Integrating values into one's belief system.

Methods for Assessing Learning in the Affective Domain

• Observation is a popular assessment method.
• For example, assessing punctuality by observing on-time arrival or timely submission of requirements.
• McMillan (2007) identifies teacher observation, self-reports, and peer ratings as feasible assessment methods.
• These methods use tools like Likert scales, semantic differentials, checklists, and sentence completion.

Teacher Observation

• Observation can be unstructured (open-ended) or structured (guided by a checklist orrating scale).
• For affective learning assessment, it is important to determine behaviors to observe in advance and record relevant data like time, date, and place.
• Unstructured observations require brief descriptions of behavior, separating interpretations from descriptions, and recording both positive and negative behaviors.
• One should conduct sufficient observations for each student while avoiding personal bias and remaining objective.

Student Self-Report

• Self-reports require students to account for their attitudes/feelings toward a concept/idea or people.
• Self-reporting is also referred to as "written reflections."
• Self-reporting can come from surveys or interviews, using constructed-response formats like essays with prewritten prompts.
• Teachers can use checklists, rating scales (Likert), or semantic differential scales for self-reporting.

Peer Ratings

• Peer ratings involve students rating their peers on affective items specified by the teacher.

Affective Assessment Tools

• Tools in different methods include Likert Scale, Semantic Differential, Checklist, sentence completion and student's written reflections.
• The Likert Scale is a rating scale with scores from 1-5 which strongly disagree and strongly agree.
• Sentence completion prompts the student to respond to an incomplete sentence.
• Semantic Differentials present scales with pairs of opposite adjectives to rate the student's feelings or beliefs.
• In a checklist, the student must check any observed or present items, and evaluate their thoughts and feelings in writing.

Formative Assessment

• Formative assessment assesses learning during instruction to ensure clarity and comprehension, addressing misunderstandings before major evaluations.

Techniques for Formative Assessment

• Response cards are pre-printed or write-on cards that allow students to indicate their responses in real time.
• An example includes prompts with "yes" or "no" answers.
• Hand signals can be used to communicate level of understanding.
• "Thumbs up" means understand, "Thumbs sideways" means unsure, and "thumbs down" means not understand.
• Game-based learning and gamified instruction are two emerging teaching-learning practices to drive learning.
• Game-based learning use any type of game.

Games for Formative Assessment

• Several different game based learning apps useful to incorporate in the classroom.
• Socrative (with both free and paid options), is a classroom app which can be transformed into a gamified race between individuals or groups.
• Kahoot is a mobile app that allows teachers to construct homework assignments as video games, with a feature for teachers to write their own games.
• Quizlet allows educators to turn data-gathering questions into gamified practice for students.
• Quizizz also lets teachers monitor student work and allows them to progress at their learning pace.
• Quizalize provides the same kinds of quizzes and assessments, and lets you track individual students at a granular level.
• Plickers is a formative assessment tool using series of abstract cards that the teacher photographs with a mobile device.

Self-Assessment in Formative Assessment

• Self-assessment is aligned with learner agency, involving student activity, initiative, and self-regulation.
• Self-regulated learners continually monitor their progress toward learning outcomes.

Scoring Rubrics and Formative Assessment

• Feedback from teacher is more specific when grading against rubrics that enumerate the criteria and describe the expected student's performance.
• Analytic rubrics can be of great help to students in assessing their own progress.

Additional Formative Assessment Strategies

• Mindful Assessment can be used to gauge a student's comprehension according to Watanabe's book: The 6 Essential fluencies of Innovative Learning (2016).
• Round Robin Charts for teachers to pass along the charts so that students may assess their overall understanding.
• Questioning Strategies may also be used with individual, small groups, or the entire class.
• 3-Way Summaries may students to work in groups or individually.
• Think-Pair-Share can be used for the teacher to question what students' answers are.
• 3-2-1 Countdown is when the teacher requires students to respond to three separate statements at the end of the lesson.
• For example: things you didn't know or what surprised you about this topic.
• One-minute-Paper is something that may be done at the end of the day, so that they may reflect on the confusing areas of a topic.
• Exit/Admit Tickets: small pieces of paper or cards that students submit to the teacher as they hand them in.
• Creative Extension Projects: students come up with simple projects to demonstrate comprehension.
• This includes a poster or skit about the topic.