Leading view papers – Days 1 to 7

Personalising learning through ePortfolios

 

 

This paper will examine the Australian Science and Mathematics School’s (ASMS) work with electronic portfolios, which are used as a vehicle to develop Personalised Learning Plans with students. The paper provides answers to two of the questions posed by this online discussion: ‘How can we grow learner autonomy through the curriculum?’ and ‘How can the new technologies be harnessed to provide meaningful learning experiences for students?’

The belief that students’ learning is enhanced when they control their learning is embedded in the philosophy and practice of the Australian Science and Mathematics School. At the ASMS, students are expected and supported to track their learning, reflect on it and then plan their pathways through the school and into the world outside. To this end, all students co-develop, with their tutor, a Personalised Learning Plan. Currently, students are supported to construct their Personalised Learning Plan as an electronic portfolio.

David Hargreaves (Hargreaves 2005) has outlined five core themes that characterise successful personalisation of learning. These themes are:

• engagement of the student in their learning
• responsibility assumed by the student for their behaviour and learning
• independence in student control over learning
• maturity in relationships with staff and peers
• co-construction by students of their education and the design of teaching and learning.

The themes of engagement, responsibility, independence, maturity and co-construction are threads that run through the ASMS work with ePortfolios, to enable students to personalise their learning journey through the school.

ePortfolios give learners control over learning

The ASMS belief in the power of student control to enhance learning is supported by educational theory and research. In their report on the results from PISA 2000 (Artelt, Baumert et al. 2003), the authors state that, ‘There is a broad literature on the effects of self-regulated learning on scholastic achievement. Students who are able to regulate their learning effectively are more likely to achieve specific learning goals’. They state that self-regulated learning is generally understood to include:

• students’ use of learning goals to guide their learning
• students having the appropriate skills and knowledge to direct their learning
• students being able to select appropriate strategies to apply to the learning task
• students being motivated to engage in the learning process.

There are many definitions of ePortfolios. A useful definition is given by the University of California at Berkeley’s Leadership Development Program (Walz 2006), which describes an ePortfolio as, ‘a highly personalized, customizable, Web-based information management system, which allows students to reflect upon and demonstrate individual and collaborative growth, achievement, and learning over time’. Walz stresses of three important aspects of ePortfolio development: first, an ePortfolios is most valuable when it are a personalised document; second, that reflection on learning is an essential aspect of an ePortfolio; and third, that the ePortfolios should consider learning over a period of time.

The ASMS believes that ePortfolios are an excellent vehicle to guide the personalisation of student’s learning. The digital nature of electronic portfolios works in three ways to create new uses of portfolios for learning. Firstly, an ePortfolio is able to encompass a wide range of electronic presentations, including text documents, data sources, sound files, photos, video, and so on. Secondly, the ePortfolio user is able to link these documents in many ways to create a multitude of representations of the portfolio. Thirdly, the electronic nature of the portfolio allows for the inclusion of a wide range of communication strategies to interactively link portfolios with other ePortfolio users and ePortfolio audiences.

Zubizaretta (Zubizaretta 2004) writes that ePortfolios are of most benefit to student learning when there is:

‘an intentional focus on the learning piece, the deliberate and systematic attention, not only to skills development but to a student’s self-reflective, metacognitive appraisal of what was learned, how was it learned, when was it learned best, and, more importantly, why learning has occurred … more enriched learning is likely to occur if the student is encouraged to come to terms self-consciously over the duration of an academic endeavour …  with key questions about learning’.

His writing supports the ePortfolio as a tool to encourage students to become Artlet’s self-regulated learners.

Helen Barrett (Barrett 2004; Barrett and Wilderson 2004; Barrett 2005) identifies the value of an ePortfolio as a metacognitive tool to support student learning. Barrett takes support from the work of Dewey (Dewey 1916) to explain that students learn best when reflecting on their experiences. Barrett describes a portfolio as a deep story of a student’s learning, where the learner tells the story of their own learning, using the portfolio to convince the audience that this is the best story that can be told about their learning.

ePortfolios play an important role in developing students as strategic learners. When working with paper-based portfolios, Pollari (Pollari 2000) found that the student’s role in the classroom changed as a result of portfolio development. Students were able to take more decision-making power and to be accountable for their actions. Students were able to set goals and work in self-directed ways. The process was not without problems, as both students and teachers were confused about changing roles for groups and individuals within the classroom in the portfolio process.

Personalised learning and ePortfolios at the ASMS

To enable students to optimise their use of Personalised Learning Plans, the ASMS has refined the process for building ePortfolios. In 2006 the purpose of student ePortfolios was twofold: firstly, for tracking and planning learning pathways and, secondly, to showcase learning. The school provided students with a range of options for building ePortfolios that took account of their interest in, and skills with, technology.

The ASMS believes that the ePortfolio must be an easy-to-use, personalised tool that can be called on seamlessly in the student’s day. To this end, the ePortfolio was linked to significant aspects of the school curriculum, including:

• making the ePortfolio an integral part of learning in the Central Studies, by building reflection on learning in Central Studies within the ePortfolio and then developing assessable learning tasks that are based on these reflections
• linking the ePortfolio to transition tools, including the myfuture website, and planning to link to Education Australia’s online Employability Skills portfolio
• accrediting work with the ePortfolio against the South Australian Certificate of Education
• using ePortfolios as a gateway to access a range of activities and programs within, and outside, the school (for example, Projects of Significant Learning, overseas student visit, work experience and vocational education and training programs)
• using evidence of student learning, stored within their ePortfolio, to demonstrate his or her capabilities to achieve the ASMS Graduate Certificate
• using the ePortfolio to guide Learning Conversations — discussions between the student, their parent and the tutor about the student’s learning successes, areas for growth and learning pathways.

Throughout 2005 and 2006, the school gathered quantitative data regarding student engagement with ePortfolios, along with qualitative data from students and staff to inform the school about student use of ePortfolios to support and enhance their learning.

Data indicates that ASMS students have significant and growing engagement with ePortfolios. Older students who previously used paper-based Personalised Learning Plans have found some difficulty engaging with ePortfolios, while students newer to the school have engaged more readily with the concept. In 2006, while 82 per cent of all students were using an ePortfolio, only 65% of year 12s had one. In 2006 at year 11, 91 per cent of students had an ePortfolio, compared with 77 per cent of year 11 in 2005. In 2006, 93 per cent of students in years 10 and 11 had some form of ePortfolio. Tutors indicated that a little under half of the students were using ePortfolios for multiple purposes. The data indicates that, while students are creating and using ePortfolios, the possibility exists for far deeper engagement with their use as a learning tool.

Qualitative data was collected from staff and students in a number of ways, including surveys, focus group discussions and individual interviews. The qualitative data has been used to give an insight into individual student’s use of ePortfolios as a vehicle to track, reflect on and plan their learning pathways. The majority of comments from Tutors have been positive about the potential of ePortfolios, while some tutors have been frustrated and disappointed with the disinterest shown by some students.

Qualitative data from students gave a range of very positive comments about their use of ePortfolios. One student, Ryan (not his real name), summarised the power of ePortfolios as Personalised Learning Plans to motivate students, ‘My previous school was pushing you to do your work, as opposed to helping you through it and using punishments as incentives as opposed to goal setting’. His comment captures an essential aspect of the Australian Science and Maths School’s approach to student learning. We are leading, mentoring and supporting students to take control over their learning pathways. Personalised Learning Plans and ePortfolios are one of the main vehicles to achieve this aim.

Surveys and interviews with individual students have indicated that they were using ePortfolios for a range of purposes, including:

• as a vehicle for showing their individual personality
• as an organisational tool
• for connecting their learning across disciplines
• for reflection and goal setting
• as a gallery of demonstrations of learning
• to showcase their achievements
• as a vehicle for learning ICT skills
• to showcase of their ICT skills.

It is interesting to note that, while the school has outlined two main purposes for the ePortfolio; firstly, tracking and planning their learning and, secondly, as a showcase of learning, students are using them for a wider range of purposes.

The ASMS approach to ePortfolios is firmly based on the notion of assessment as learning. There is strong support in the literature for the ePortfolio as a metacognitive tool, a tool to develop students as self-regulated learners, which will assist them to achieve educational goals. The ASMS approach to ePortfolios encourages students to use them to personalise their learning pathway through the school, with the goal that more students will be more successful in their chosen pathways.

Future directions

While ePortfolios are a relatively new phenomenon, they share a strong practical and research base with traditional paper-based portfolios. There is not just one meaning to the term ePortfolio. There are multiple combinations of the varying purposes, forms and audiences, as well as a wide range of technologies being used to create ePortfolios. The promise of newer technologies is continually creating new meanings for ePortfolios. When attempting to examine the potential for ePortfolios to support and enhance student learning, the ASMS must continually return to the questions: ‘Which ePortfolios?’ and ‘What learning?’

The strong uptake of ePortfolios by our students, and the variety of approaches they have taken to developing their individual formats and styles, indicates the success of ePortfolios as a support to student metacognitive learning and personal pathway planning. It is clear that they are a very powerful learning tool, if structured to include reflection and other metacognitive strategies. The ASMS will continue to research the optimum use of ePortfolios, for our students, in our unique situation.

References

Artelt, C, Baumert, J et al., Eds. (2003). ‘Learners for life: student approaches to learning’. Results from PISA 2000. OECD
Barrett, HC (2004). ePortfolios: Digital stories of deep learning. ePortfolio Australia. The University of Melbourne.
www.electronicportfolios.org
Barrett, HC (2005). ‘White paper: researching electronic portfolios and learner engagement’. Retrieved 5/3/2006 from: http://electronicportfolios.org
Barrett, HC and Wilderson, J (2004). ‘Conflicting paradigms in electronic portfolio approaches: choosing an electronic portfolio strategy that matches your conceptual framework’. Retrieved 15/7/2006 from: http://electronicportfolios.org
Dewey, J (1916). Democracy and education.   Retrieved 7/72006, from: www.ilt.columbia.edu
Hargreaves, D (2005). Personalising learning - 4. London: Specialist Schools and Academies Trust.
Pollari, P (2000). ‘This is my portfolio’: portfolios in upper secondary school English studies. Jyvaskyla, Finland, Institute for Educational Research, Customer Services, University of Jyvalkyla.
Walz, P (2006). ‘An overview of student ePortfolio functions’. In Handbook of research on ePortfolios. A. Jafari and C. Kaufman, Idea Group Reference: 648.
Zubizaretta, J (2004). ‘The learning portfolio for improvement and assessment of student learning: a primer’. Retrieved 5/11/2006 from: www.columbiacollegesc.edu

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Kevin Nelson is Student Counsellor at the Australian Science and Mathematics School, in Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia.

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