1. What Culture Do We Want?
An Argument for
Deliberative Assessment with Eportfolios
Darren Cambridge
October 22, 2010
Assessment Institute

2. A Disruptive Innovation
E-Portfolio “projects … at their most effective … are (in
very good ways) highly disruptive. They throw up
needs for organizational change; change in
governance; changes in the roles of many [faculty], and
the consequent need for [faculty] development,
changes in pedagogy, and hence to the nature and
shape and form of [majors], and the consequent needs
for educational development support; changes to the
student’s ‘contract’ with [her institution] … If they are
to deliver maximum effect … projects must accept and
embrace all of these areas of implication, and no doubt
others.”
−David Baume

3. Don’t do e-portfolio just for the
purpose of assessment.

4. Rethinking Assessment
Assessment means making student learning
visible so that it can inform programmatic and
curricular innovation and demonstrate effect
on learning and identity development

5. Looking afresh means asking:
• What kinds of learning do we value?
• What assessment process do those values
imply?
• How does this change how we think about
outcomes and evidence?

6. Minimum competence versus
excellence and opportunity

7. WHAT DO WE VALUE ABOUT
INDIVIDUAL LEARNING AND IDENTITY
DEVELOPMENT?

8. Authenticity
• Finding truth through examination
of what is unique about oneself
• Enacting that difference through
creative expression
• Protecting choice as a core value

10. Social Authenticity
Becoming an authentic
individual is not a matter
of recoiling from society
in order to find and
express the inner self.
What it involves is the
ability to be a reflective
individual who discerns
what is genuinely worth
pursuing within the social
context in which he or
she is situated.

12. “Finding the Thread in My Life”

13. Integrity
• Consistency and coherence over time
(lifelong)
• Consistency and coherence across roles
(lifewide)
• Achieved and asserted through narrative

14. From Subject to Author
• Ordering role of institutions and traditions
shifted to individual
• From being our values, relationships, and
experiences to having them
• Overarching principles that mediate
competition
• Thinking about the self as a system you
compose and conduct

15. Symphonic Employability
• Career identity
integrates
– Human capital
(competencies)
– Social capital
– Adaptability
• Cultivated by narrative
- Ashford et. al.

16. Social Integrity

17. Environments for Growth
• In both personal and
professional domains
– Learning as attitude toward life
– Supported by inviting environments
rich in content and people
– Technology as a means to guide and
support
• Communicated by the portfolios
as a whole
• Can inform her profession

18. IMPLICATIONS FOR HOW WE DO
ASSESSMENT

19. Three curricula
Kathleen Yancey, Reflection in the Writing Classroom

20. Competencies
• Communication
• Critical Thinking
• Strategic Problem
Solving
• Valuing
• Group Interaction
• Global
Understanding
• Effective Citizenship
• Aesthetic Awareness
• Information
Technology

22. Rubrics

23. Liberal Education for
America’s Promise
• Knowledge of Human Cultures
and the Physical and Natural
World
– Through study in the sciences
and mathematics, social
sciences, humanities, histories,
languages, and the arts
• Intellectual and Practical Skills
– Inquiry and analysis
– Critical and creative thinking
– Written and oral
communication
– Quantitative literacy
– Information literacy
– Teamwork and problem
solving
• Personal and Social
Responsibility
– Civic knowledge and
engagement—local and global
– Intercultural knowledge and
competence
– Ethical reasoning and action
– Foundations and skills for
lifelong learning
• Integrative Learning
– Synthesis and advanced
accomplishment across
general and specialized studies

24. VALUE Intercultural Rubric

26. • Useful
• Cost-effective
• Reasonably accurate and
truthful
– Multiple
– Direct
• Planned, organized,
systematized and sustained
• Kinds of direct evidence
– Portfolios of student work
– Student reflections on their
values, attitudes, and beliefs, if
developing those are intended
outcomes of the course or
program

27. Deliberative Assessment
• Student are privileged informants about their
own learning.
• Evidence of learning needs to come from
multiple contexts, and the relationships
between them need to be articulated.
• Assessment should be a system of deliberative
processes inclusive of all stakeholders that
makes programs more responsive to them.

28. A New Role for Competencies
• Standardized
– Matching performance to a
pre-defined set of outcomes
– Articulating expectations to students
• Deliberative
– Capture standards all stakeholders value as enacted in
practice and examining alignment of both student and
programmatic performance
– Means for mutually accountable connection between
individual and organizational learning
– Boundary objects

29. Ineffable  Essentially Contested
• Ineffable outcomes: Things we all think are
important but don’t think we can measure
– E.g., ethics, leadership, social responsibility
• Essentially contested concept (Gallie, 1956)
– More optimal development because of
contestation

30. Liberal Education for
America’s Promise (LEAP)
• Knowledge of Human Cultures
and the Physical and Natural
World
– Through study in the sciences
and mathematics, social
sciences, humanities, histories,
languages, and the arts
• Intellectual and Practical Skills
– Inquiry and analysis
– Critical and creative thinking
– Written and oral
communication
– Quantitative literacy
– Information literacy
– Teamwork and problem
solving
• Personal and Social
Responsibility
– Civic knowledge and
engagement—local and global
– Intercultural knowledge and
competence
– Ethical reasoning and action
– Foundations and skills for
lifelong learning
• Integrative Learning
– Synthesis and advanced
accomplishment across
general and specialized
studies

31. Eportfolios for Contested Outcomes
• Measurable learning outcome: Ability to
articulate a reasoned stance based on
evidence
• Makes multiple understandings of outcomes
visible
• Requires reasoning to be articulated
• Grounds understanding in evidence and
experience
• Puts multiple positions into conversation

35. Deliberative E-Portfolio Assessment
• Assessment as both a social and individual
good means moving:
• From measuring outcomes to putting
authentic, integral self-representations into
conversation
• From consensus to contestation
• From proof to inquiry
• From authorship to participation with
authenticity and integrity

36. Inter/National Coalition for
Electronic Portfolio Research
• 60 campuses from five
countries
• Six three-year cohorts
• Individual research questions
• Common questions
• Bi-annual meetings and online
collaboration
• Demonstrated links to
increased student
engagement, retention, study
skills, course completion, and
employability
• Two members received 2010
FIPSE funding for project
informed by Coalition work
• AAC&U VALUE project
leadership campuses largely
drawn from Coalition
membership and results
frequently cited in their
publications

37. Cohort VI
• Focused on assessment that capitalizes on
what is distinctive about e-portfolios
• Non-negotiable core
• Capabilities of the digital, networked
environment
• Role in accreditation

38. • Interaction of Pieces of Evidence
– For meaningful assessment, interaction of pieces of
evidence within an eportfolio is more important than
single pieces of evidence
• Relationship between Evidence and Reflection
– Reflection on pieces of evidence within an eportfolio and
on the eportfolio as a whole provides information for
assessment that isn’t available by other means
• Meaningful Comparison without Standardization
– Eportfolios enable meaningful comparison of student
learning across institutions (and other contexts) without
standardization
• Material Practices
– The material practice of eportfolio composition generates
distinctive knowledge about learning

39. Meaningful Comparisons without
Standardization
Eportfolios enable meaningful comparison
of student learning
across institutions
without standardization.

40. Can deliberative assessment scale?

41. Maximizing return on attention

46. Capturing the knowledge generated
through the deliberative process

48. Published by Stylus, 2009
ncepr.org/darren (slides here)
dcambrid@gmail.com
Published by Jossey-Bass, 2010