Mathematics: A New Kind of Portfolio Assessment

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Mathematics: A New Kind of Portfolio Assessment

I sat pondering in my classroom as I calculated my grades for my first six weeks of teaching. I began wondering as I looked over grades how accurate these grades were to the ability of my students. I began to wonder how the grades showed the growth from where some of my students started at the beginning of the year. Some of my students started below grade level to begin with and had made tremendous gains to function at the level they were functioning at. However, with the traditional grading system, it tests how much they know at the sixth grade level. According to this grading system, these students were still failing or minimally passing.

This situation began to bother me and I remembered back to when I had read about portfolio assessment in my language arts blocks in college. I began to wonder if portfolio assessment could be more effective than this traditional approach to assessment. If it is more effective, why is that? As I was thinking about this, more reflections came to me such as, how does portfolio assessment take into consideration the way students learn and what have theorists said about learning and assessing mathematics. Furthermore, I needed to know if this assessment could even be applied to my own teaching.

Background

In the last decade there has been a call for more authentic assessment from across all content areas. The question has been, is portfolio assessment the answer? Koca and Lee talk about the benefits of portfolio assessment over traditional assessment in mathematics. Their view focuses on how traditional assessment takes away the “mathematical tasks of reasoning, communicating, and problems solving.” They take a brief stance on this p...

... middle of paper ...

...Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

Martin-Kniep, Giselle (1998), Why Am I Doing This? Purposeful Teaching Through Portfolio Assessment, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

Polya, George, (1957) How to Solve It, Princeton University press, Princeton, NJ.

Schoenfeld, Alan (1988), “When Good Teaching Leads to Bad Results: The Disasters of ‘Well-Taught’ Mathematics Courses,” Educational Psychologist, 23 (2), 145-166.

Shaklee, Beverly, Barbour, Nancy, Ambrose, Richard, and Hansford, Susan (1997) Designing and Using Portfolios, Allyn and Bacon, Needham Heights, MA.

Skemp, Richard 91987), The Psychology of Learning Mathematics, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillside, NJ.

Sousa, David (1995), How the Brain Learns, National Association of Secondary School Principles, Reston, V.A.

Sunstein, Bonnie and Lovell, Jonathan (2000), The Portfolio Standard, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

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