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A Richer Picture of Student Performance

Digital Portfolio, Chapter 3

Carrie E. Tompkins Elementary School
Croton-on-Hudson, New York

Contents

- About the School
- The Process: Issues in Implementation
    - Vision
    - Assessment
    - Technology
    - Logistics
    - Culture
- The Products: Sample Digital Portfolios
- Further Information
- Supplemental Material
    - Case Study

About the School

Carrie E. Tompkins (CET) Elementary School is a public school in Croton-on-Hudson, a town of about 7,000 residents located 32 miles north of New York City. CET is the district's sole elementary school, serving students in grades K through 5. With 620 students across the six grades, CET is larger than the district's middle or high schools.

The Croton-Harmon School District has long had a reputation as a "good" school district, and the town's residents have supported the schools, both financially (through the passing of budgets and bond issues) and politically. In the 1990's, the district has embarked on a number of innovations, aiming to improve the education received by all students in the district. When the district was approached in 1993 about becoming involved with the Digital Portfolio project, Sherry King, the Croton-Harmon Superintendent, talked with the district's three principals, faculty members, school board members, and parent and community groups, and concluded that this effort would help the district's overall effort in examining assessments that would better demonstrate each student's achievements and abilities. (For more information about the work of the other schools in the district, see the chapters on Pierre van Cortlandt Middle School, and Croton-Harmon High School.)

At CET, the Digital Portfolio fit with an overall effort to work with portfolios throughout the school. In 1994, the school developed its "Portfolio Plan" in a series of faculty meetings. The document outlines five goals for guiding teacher and student work with portfolios:

• To help students become more reflective about themselves
• as learners
• To demonstrate evidence of student growth and achievement
• To inform instruction, influence practice, and set goals
• To extend children's learning
• To support and explain the grading system

David Allen, in describing CET's work in the New York Assessment Collection, wrote the following:

In the words of principal Lauren Campbell, the use of portfolios and the school-wide focus on discussing student work raises two important questions for faculty members, "What does this work tell us about kids as learners?" and "How does what we learn from looking at their work impact our instruction?" For students, the goal of portfolio work centers on self-assessment and reflection on work accomplished. At Carrie E. Tompkins, portfolios are considered a means for students and teachers to better understand each child as an individual learner.

The Digital Portfolio provided a different mechanism for working with portfolios. The school has continued to work with paper portfolios throughout the building, while a pilot group of teachers in the 5th grade began the work of examining how computer technology could enhance the process of collecting, selecting, and reflecting on student work. At the end of the 1995-96 school year, about 50 students in two 5th grade classes had put together digital portfolios.

The Process: Issues in Implementation

Vision

A school's vision helps students, parents, and faculty to understand what is expected of students.

What should a student know and be able to do?

The primary organizing principle in CET's Digital Portfolio is a set of four "selves":

• Social Self
• Problem-Solving Self
• Artistic Self
• Academic Self

The teachers and the students at CET see the Digital Portfolio as a way of introducing themselves to readers of the portfolio. They want to show different aspects of their work and their lives, and these "selves" are meant to help students see these portfolios as representations of specific parts of their work. (You can see this idea of "portfolio as introducer" in the way the opening screen introduces each student: "Please click the button below to learn more about me.")

Why these four areas? When the CET staff discussed how to organize the work in the Digital Portfolio, they realized that they didn't usually think about student's work just along subject lines. When they thought about how students grew, they thought about how each student can grow differently in social and academic skills. These four selves are often the primary areas that they use to talk about a student's achievement with his or her parents. The areas overlap, of course, but the staff saw that the technology could take advantage of that fact, and allow different entries to represent more than one of these "selves."

Assessment

The school's assessment system lets students learn about their progress towards fulfilling the vision.

How can students demonstrate the vision?

At CET, teachers had been using paper portfolios for several years before the school became involved in the Digital Portfolio work. As part of the "Portfolio Plan," the teachers created expectations for student portfolios. After a series of meetings, the faculty created two portfolio descriptions, one for grades K-2, and another for grades 3-5.

In the first year of working with Digital Portfolios, the 5th graders typically entered five of the pieces from their paper portfolio. Many of the students examined their portfolios and selected entries that would show at least one sample in each of the different "selves."

The students previously had practice working with portfolios, starting with their work in 4th grade. In Mary Allen Gorham's case study, she notes:

Beginning in November 1994, and each February, May, and November since then, students involved in this pilot project choose 2-4 pieces of work of any subject that they are most proud of for inclusion in their portfolios. These pieces might be work they like the most or have worked hardest on, and not necessarily their "best" work in either their own eyes or their teacher's eyes. They then compare their work to previous work they have done, using the portfolio as a vehicle for this self-reflection and self-assessment. Rather than using a set of standards or other students' work as a basis of comparison, students are encouraged to look at where they are solely in terms of where they themselves have come. For students as well as teachers, the portfolio was (and still is) seen as helpful and nonthreatening.

Why do we collect student work?

As Mary Allen Gorham describes in her case study, portfolios at CET are primarily used as "an instruction and learning tool rather than an assessment tool. ... Rather than being concerned primarily with how children were learning relative to each other, the staff wanted to see how each child's learning progress relative to previous points in time."

The five goals described by the CET faculty in the portfolio plan (see the section About the School) was a focus for the school's work in developing both the digital and paper portfolios. Still, the faculty regularly revisited the question of "why do we collect student work" in their discussions with students, parents, and community members. To accomplish the goal of students becoming reflective on their learning, and for teachers to be able to use the portfolios as a way of learning about their students (and thus, being able to change the practice accordingly), each student needs to make the portfolio his or her own, and see it as a true representation of his or her abilities.

The Digital Portfolio added another reason for collecting student work in multimedia format: it was a vehicle for teaching students about the technology itself. By using the hardware and software to digitize their work, students had an opportunity to develop skills in word processing, manipulating graphics, and working with digital audio and video. The Digital Portfolio allowed the students to see the technology as a tool to be used for a different purpose (creating a portfolio) rather than an end to itself.

What audiences are most important to us?

CET has been very clear that the primary audience for the portfolio are the students themselves. The portfolios, paper and digital, help students understand what areas of themselves they should be developing, and to reflect on what they consider to be their best accomplishments. The students, in turn, wanted to show their work, primarily to the audiences most important to them: their peers and their parents.

The teachers use the portfolios as well to understand the students' abilities and to consider how they might adjust instruction for each individual student, or for the class as a whole. There is continuing talk in New York State for examining alternative assessments for different purposes, and while teachers are aware of what is happening at that level, it is not of primary concern for this work.

How do we know what's good?

Students and teachers throughout the school spend time at the beginning of the year thinking about what criteria should be used for deciding what goes into a portfolio. The list is generated by the students in each class, and while each class may word it differently, the following list from a fourth-grade class is typical:

• It is neat
• We put effort into it
• We are proud of it
• It contains unique ideas
• It contains detail and description

The entry slips, which are forms that a student completes for each entry in the portfolio, also help to define criteria. The slips help the student to think about what kinds of work they have done (by asking which subject areas are represented or whether this piece was done alone or in a group), and to specifically state why this piece should be selected for the portfolio. The self-reflection helps the reader of the portfolio understand what the student saw in his or her work.

Technology

Digital Portfolios are obviously dependent on the use of technology, but a school's effective use of technology goes beyond the use of equipment.

What hardware, software, and networking will we need?

When we on the Digital Portfolio research staff helped to develop the technology plan for the pilot schools, we wanted to determine which equipment made the most sense for the intended users. Given that more of an elementary school student's work uses multiple media, and that a computer's graphical capabilities could be more helpful to younger students, we put more emphasis on multimedia equipment at CET than in the other schools in the project.

The school received 18 computers as a part of the grant. All of these were outfitted with sound cards to allow for audio input and playback. The school put the bulk (13) of these machines in a computer lab; the students in grades 3-5 working on digital portfolios could use that lab. The other machines were placed in primary (grade 2) classrooms, so that those students could work on the machines without pulling the entire class out. (Ultimately, the school plans to have machines in every classroom, although there still may be a need for a lab where all students in a class could work at once.)

Students used ClarisWorks for most of their word processing needs. The Digital Portfolio software used by the school does allow students to type their work directly into the portfolio, but the editor we developed did not allow for as much formatting as ClarisWorks or other word processors, and a bug in the Digital Portfolio software did not always allow work to be saved correctly. After getting frustrated with the Digital Portfolio's internal editor, most students word processed their writing in ClarisWorks, and then entered that file into the portfolio.

Most entries in the portfolios contained some kind of graphic. Usually, students created these pieces by hand, so they needed to be scanned into digital form. The school had two scanners in the lab (one, a high-end flatbed scanner, and one, a lower-end paper-feed scanner). Students noted, though, that the images on the screen weren't identical matches of the work they created by hand; the colors, for example, might look a little different on the screen than on paper. While this wasn't a "problem" -- student work was still visible to the reader -- students had to adjust their expectations of what the digital versions of their work and photographs would look like.

The machines were connected to an Ethernet network within the lab; the classroom computers are connected to a district-wide network (which was installed after this study was completed). The primary purpose of the network is to share resources, such as the printer and the scanner. Prior to the installation of the network, each student would have his or her portfolio on a designated machine. This meant that the students buddied up when they went to the computer lab, two students per computer. The students would take turns working on their portfolios, and often, they would help each other with digitizing the work.

CET received, as part of the grant, 12 IBM PC 350 computers, with 486 DX2-66 processors, 4 to 8 megabytes of RAM, and 270 megabyte hard drives, and sound cards. The school's 6 multimedia machines were IBM PC 350 machines, with 486 DX4-100 processors, CD-ROM drives, an upgraded hard drive (to 540 megabytes), 16 megabytes of RAM, and sound cards. The server was an IBM PC server 86400NJ, with 16 megabytes of RAM, a 486 DX2-66 processor, and 1 gigabyte hard drive. Each machine also had an IBM 10BaseT Ethernet card, and ran Novell Netware for the network. The school also used IBM ADF color scanners and Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanners.

Who will support the system?

Support has been a critical issue at CET. Prior to the grant of IBM equipment, the school's Extended Learning teacher also doubled as a computer coordinator; however, there were just a few computers in the school. When the infusion of IBM equipment arrived, the school hired a full-time computer aide to manage the network, install software, and provide technical support for the teachers and students as they use the computer lab.

Who will support the system?

Support has been a critical issue at CET. Prior to the grant of IBM equipment, the school's Extended Learning teacher also doubled as a computer coordinator; however, there were just a few computers in the school. When the infusion of IBM equipment arrived, the school hired a full-time computer aide to manage the network, install software, and provide technical support for the teachers and students as they use the computer lab.

Logistics

The creation of a school-wide digital portfolio requires that a school consider its use of time and space.

When will information be digitized? Who will do it?

During the pilot year of working with Digital Portfolios, two 5th grade classrooms selected work from their paper portfolios, and entered that work into Digital Portfolios. The teachers brought the classes, as a whole, to the computer lab, once a week for six to eight weeks; each session was for about 50 minutes. In the first session, Michelle Riconscente from the Digital Portfolio research staff walked the students through the software, and provided a tutorial on how to use it. (These groups of students took to the machines and the software very easily; all of the students had some prior experience using computers in school.) After that initial session, students would place one or two entries into the portfolio during each session in the computer lab. The bulk of that time was spent digitizing the work -- either retyping a paper or poem into the computer, or scanning in a photograph or piece of artwork. Once the work was in the computer, entering it into the computer took just a few minutes.

The students typically worked in pairs, since the two classes had about twice as many students as there were computers in the lab. While each student was responsible for his or her individual portfolio, the students generally worked together, concentrating on one student's portfolio, and then the other's.

Who will select the work?

Students typically selected the work for their portfolios although teachers were also able to select two pieces, based on criteria that the class had created earlier in the year. (Each entry slip asked the student to identify who had selected the work.) The teachers were checking on the students' portfolios throughout the year, so they were aware of what the students had selected for their paper portfolios.

When it came time to digitize the portfolios, students selected about five entries. The specific pieces were left up to the students, since all of the pieces in the paper portfolio had already been reviewed by the teacher. Students typically selected the work for their portfolios although teachers were also able to select two pieces, based on criteria that the class had created earlier in the year. (Each entry slip asked the student to identify who had selected the work.) The teachers were checking on the students' portfolios throughout the year, so they were aware of what the students had selected for their paper portfolios.

Who will reflect on the work?

Students and teachers often reflect on the work as part of the process of creating the portfolio. At CET, students are asked to add 2-4 pieces to their portfolios in November, February, and May of each year; this is typically used as a time for teachers and students to review the contents of their portfolio, and to look at their growth.

Students worked on their Digital Portfolios in the spring of the final year of the project, and thus, our study did not investigate how students would reflect on their work months or years later. However, it is encouraging that CET has already built time into its calendar for students and teachers to reflect on student achievements over the past few months, and the Digital Portfolio should simply allow that to continue in another medium.

Parent conferences are also an opportunity to reflect on the work. The CET staff already makes use of portfolios for parent conferences, showing the work that each student has done, and what type of growth the work demonstrates.

Culture

For digital portfolios to be taken seriously as a school-wide endeavor, the school's culture needs to allow for regular conversation about student work and about the school's standards.

Is the school used to discussing student work?

The Digital Portfolio was introduced after the CET staff had been developing a portfolio plan for several years. The examination of student work was becoming a more central part of the culture of the school.

Typically, these discussions take place among teachers in the same grade, or within the K-2 or 3-5 divisions of the school. The needs for discussing student work are different in a school (like most elementary schools) where students spend most of their day with one teacher than the needs in a school (like most secondary schools) where students see three to eight teachers every day. The discussions of student work are about "how can we help this particular student" as opposed to "are you seeing the same thing in your class that I'm seeing in mine?"

The school has regular monthly meetings among staff, and there are also individual meetings between the school's administrators, faculty and support staff weekly. Lauren Campbell, the school's principal, often refers back to the school's purposes for using portfolios (see the About the School section) for framing the conversations about portfolios.

The portfolio system is reviewed at the end of each year. Changes are made over the summer and introduced at the beginning of the new school year.

Is the school open to tuning standards? With whom?

The staff at CET was introduced to the examination of student work and portfolios primarily through the school's involvement with the New Standards Project and the Coalition of Essential Schools. These national organizations of schools and school reformers offer opportunities for schools to share their work with others. Many of the faculty had visited other schools and attended workshops based on different approaches to portfolios, and principal Lauren Campbell and others would often distribute articles on portfolios from professional journals. It's safe to say that CET's faculty all had a basic knowledge of portfolios when the project began, and a sense of what some other schools and organizations were doing.

This professional development put the school's work in context; as the school was implementing its Portfolio Plan, the faculty knew that the plan belonged to CET, but was informed by the work of other schools, and by the research and publications that they had read.

As the school's collective thinking about portfolios began to emerge, the faculty was regularly willing to share their work. The school took advantage of conferences as a chance not just to show their work, but to get some reactions from colleagues outside the school. The school also worked with outside consultants to help develop rubrics and learn how to approach the issues of developing the portfolio.

Most importantly, the school's faculty had regular conversations about its work with students, parents, and community members. Some parents and community members have served on school committees to help develop the portfolio plan and to provide feedback on the progress of the plan. Others have become involved through their professional connections; for example, some parents who work for IBM and other area high-tech firms have provided advice and service in putting the technology in place. In other words, parent involvement goes beyond helping with bake sales; there is a conscious attempt to inform parents of what is expected of students at each grade level.

One particularly interesting attempt at tuning standards came in March, 1995. Each of the three schools in the Croton-Harmon district was preparing to implement Digital Portfolios in the following school year. During one of the annual "superintendent's days" (a professional development day for the district's faculty), the three schools tuned their plans with each other. First, a committee from each school was designated to present the ideas developed at the school. These were all clearly works in progress, and the presentations were not so much to present finished ideas as to get some input as to how to proceed.

Each of these groups then worked through a "tuning protocol." In the protocol, a group presented its work to a set of colleagues. After taking a couple of "clarifying questions" to make sure that all the facts were correct, the presenters stayed silent while the listeners provided some feedback about the presentation. (The feedback was explicitly divided among "warm" and "cool" comments, allowing the commentators to provide feedback that showed both the areas of strength and the areas that needed improvement.) Finally, the presenters responded to some of the listeners' comments. (For further details on tuning protocols, see David Allen's paper "The Tuning Protocol.")

In this case, the schools went through the protocol twice. First, the audience of respondents were teachers from the district's other schools -- that is, the elementary school team presented to a combination of middle and high school teachers, while the rest of the elementary school faculty was listening and reacting to the work done at the other schools. Then, the schools did the protocol with their own faculties, allowing the presenting group to get feedback on the school's plans in the light of what the other schools in the district were doing.

The district protocol provided an opportunity for the faculty at each school to modify their ideas for the portfolio, and allowed the research staff of the project to incorporate those new ideas into the Digital Portfolio software.

The Products: Sample Digital Portfolios

Figure 1: Title Screen

When you open a digital portfolio from CET, the title screen shows you the student's name and a photo. Many of the students played with the punctuation around their names, using the equivalent of "emoticons" to illustrate their names.

Figure 2: Main Menu

This is the main menu of the portfolio. The school asks students to represent four "selves," shown as buttons along the left hand side of the screen. In this figure, the "Academic Self" button was selected; the right side shows the entries in the portfolio that demonstrate that particular "self."

Figure 3: Student Entry

Clicking on the title of an entry in Figure 2 leads you to the student work. The work is shown on the left side of the screen; text, graphics, audio, and video components will each appear in different windows. The right side provides information to help put the work in context

Figure 4: Entry Command Box

The command box shown above appears in the upper right corner of the entry screen (see Figure 3). The left side of the box lists a set of information that helps to put each entry in context. The right side of the box contains buttons that allow you to arrange the components of the entry, or to navigate to another part of the portfolio.

The command box allows the user to view four pieces of information that help to put the work in context:

The Entry Slip is a form completed by students which describes why this particular entry belongs in the portfolio. The form asked students to fill in the following information:

• What subject area does this piece represent?
• (Writing, Reading, Science, Social Studies, Math, Other)
• How did you work on this piece? alone? in a group? with a teacher or parent?
• Who edited this piece? a teacher? a peer?
• Is there a reflection for your piece? (yes or no)
• What pieces are included with your entry? an outline? draft(s)? final copy?
• Who selected this piece for your portfolio?
• Why was this piece selected for your portfolio?

The Assignment contains a brief description of what the student was asked to do. At CET, the students themselves summarized their assignments for the portfolio.

The Criteria contains the standards used to assess the student work.

The Assessment contains assessments from the teachers, or others, about the work. When you view the assessment window, you will note that multiple assessors could add their work to a student's portfolio; over time, this could include peer assessors, teachers, or parents.

(Note that the Criteria and Assessment were not filled in for most of the entries in the CET portfolios. This was primarily due to a lack of time; students were encouraged to put their work and the entry slips in first.)

The right side of the command box allows the user to control views of the portfolio:

A user may move the windows around the screen, and under the Edit menu, choose the "Set Layout" option to store the current layout of windows. The Revert button goes back to the last saved layout of windows.

When a user open an entry, not all of the components may be immediately visible. All of the components are listed in the box labeled Click for more... ; clicking on the arrow shows the complete list, from which the user may choose one to display. (To save time loading the portfolio, multimedia components are initially hidden, but may be made visible by clicking on the Click for more... list.)

The Menu button returns to the menu of entries, and the Exit button leaves the portfolio.

Further Information

Contact
Carrie E. Tompkins Elementary School
10 Gerstein Street
Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520
914-271-5184
Lauren Allen, Principal
Web site: http://www.computer.net/croton-harmon

Publications
Allen, David, "The Tuning Protocol," Studies on Exhibitions, No. 15, Coalition of Essential Schools.**

Gorham, Mary Allen, "Moving to Digital Portfolios: One Elementary School's Story," on the Digital Portfolio Sampler, CD-ROM, Coalition of Essential Schools / Annenberg Institute for School Reform, 1997. Click here to view this study.

New York Assessment Collection, a CD-ROM and print publication produced by the Coalition of Essential Schools in collaboration with the New York State Education Department, 1996.**

**(These publications may be ordered from the CES National's Web Site)

Original material, Copyright 1997.

David Niguidula
Coalition of Essential Schools
Annenberg Institute for School Reform

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