Portfolio Assessment For The Teaching And Learning Of Writing

This book provides teachers, instructors, scholars, and administrators with a practical guide to implement portfolio assessment of writing in their work contexts. Unlike most existing volumes, which underscore theory building, it describes and discusses several key issues concerning how portfolio assessment can be carried out in authentic classrooms with a focus on its processes, reflective components, task types and design, scoring methods and actionable recommendations.

This volume presents chapters by researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who study the impact of classroom portfolios in the assessment of writing achievement by elementary and middle grade students. The focus throughout the volume is on the tension between classroom assessment and externally mandated testing. It presents the efforts of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to understand the impact of classroom portfolios for the assessment of writing achievement by elementary and middle grade students. Under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Writing, the editors conducted a national survey of exemplary portfolio projects, arranged for a series of "video visits," and held several working conferences. The result of this work is a broad-ranging tale: the aspirations of teachers and administrators to move the machinery of schooling in the direction of more authentic and engaging tasks, the puzzlement of students when they realize that the assignments are real and that the teacher may not have a "right answer" in mind, and the tensions between ivory-tower ideas and everyday classroom practice. Divided into four sections, this research volume: * provides a historical perspective, develops the conceptual framework that serves as a background for many activities described throughout, and discusses numerous practical issues that confront today's researchers and practitioners; * views the phenomenon of writing portfolios through a variety of broadview lenses such as teacher enthusiasm, student reflection, assessment tension, the portfolio as metaphor, and the locus of control; * conveys important conceptual issues with a balance toward pragmatics; and * offers unique insights from the perspective of one individual who serves as scholar, researcher, and teacher.

Explains how preparing portfolios, folders that contain selected pieces of students' writing, can bridge the gap between the teaching and evaluation of writing in secondary schools.

Annotated bibliography and index.

While assessment and feedback tend to be treated separately in the L2 writing literature, this book brings together these two essential topics and examines how effective classroom assessment and feedback can provide a solid foundation for the successful teaching and learning of writing. Drawing upon current educational and L2 writing theories and research, the book is the first to address writing assessment and feedback in L2 primary and secondary classrooms, providing a comprehensive, up-to-date review of key issues, such as assessment for learning, assessment as learning, teacher feedback, peer feedback, portfolio assessment, and technology enhanced classroom writing assessment and feedback. The book concludes with a chapter on classroom assessment literacy for L2 writing teachers, outlines its critical components and underscores the importance of teachers undertaking continuing professional development to enhance their classroom assessment literacy. Written in an accessible style, the book provides a practical and valuable resource for L2 writing teachers to promote student writing, and for teacher educators to deliver effective classroom writing assessment and feedback training. Though the target audience is school teachers, L2 writing instructors in any context will benefit from the thorough and useful treatment of classroom assessment and feedback in the book.

This book explains how any teacher can build a community of writers, using portfolios to demonstrate progress across the curriculum.

This collection of 10 essays argues that portfolios in the writing classroom are worth exploring and that such exploration opens up new opportunities: new ways to learn to write, to think about teaching writing, to understand students, teachers, and curricula, and to describe and report on what is found. The collection makes this argument by sharing the stories of teachers in various situations: teachers alone, teachers as team members, and teachers concerned with administration as well as learning. Three key points are made: that portfolios should be designed locally by teachers and students; that they require periodic review; and that through such reviews more can be learned about writing and its teaching. The articles and authors are as follows: (1) Introduction: Writing Portfolios--Changes and Challenges (Catharine Lucas); (2) Teacher's Stories: Notes toward a Portfolio Pedagogy (Kathleen Blake Yancey); (3) Increasing Student Autonomy through Portfolios (Sue Ellen Gold); (4) Portfolio Practice in the Middle School: One Teacher's Story (James E. Newkirk); (5) Portfolios: Process for Students and Teachers (Catherine D'Aoust); (6) Looking into Portfolios (Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith); (7) Portfolio Reflections in Middle and Secondary School Classrooms (Roberta Camp); (8) Writing Portfolios in Secondary Schools (David Kneeshaw); (9) Portfolio Practice and Assessment for Collegiate Basic Writers (Irwin Weiser); and (10) Portfolios in the Writing Classroom: A Final Reflection (Kathleen Blake Yancey). A 39-item annotated bibliography of resources on portfolios for teaching and assessment concludes the volume. (SR)

Situating Portfolios is both reflective and forward-looking, practice-oriented but well-grounded in theory. Kathleen Yancey and Irwin Weiser bring together thirty-one writing teachers from diverse levels of instruction, institutional settings, and regions to create an inviting volume on current practice in portfolio writing assessment. The contributors here reflect on the explosion in portfolio practice over the last decade, why it happened, what comes next; discuss portfolios in hypertext, the web, and other electronic spaces; report on current and new contexts, from emergent literacy to faculty development, in which portfolios now appear; and consider emerging trends and issues that are involving portfolios in teacher assessment, faculty development, and graduate student experience. An energetic volume, Situating Portfolios gathers a wide range of experience and thinking into one stimulating discussion. It's a book that will be of interest to writing teachers and teacher educators at all levels.