Interdisciplinary Digital Portfolio Assessment: Creating Tools for Teacher Education

Abstract

Executive Summary This article provides the processes and reflections, the influences on the process and criteria, and the resulting rubric that emerged when a university-wide committee was formed to create an assessment ru-bric for a newly adopted digital portfolio initiative. Teacher education programs are experiencing reform movements in both performance based assessment and in the integration of technology into the curriculum. Performance assessment entails movement away from traditional curricula and assessment means to achieve more authentic, "real world" ways of verifying the preparedness of education graduates. Our institution's response to these reform efforts is centered on the newly adopted requirement of a digital portfolio for all preservice teachers. Digital portfolios by preservice teacher education majors have brought a new challenge in the assessment of digital products for institutions of teacher education nationwide. This challenge is magnified when preservice teachers are studying in various areas of licensure, many of which are traditionally housed in various colleges throughout a university. To provide assessment coherency across disciplines, a group of faculty members representing almost all content or teacher licensure areas in teacher education was formed to begin the process of shaping the digital portfolio assessment rubric. The evolution of the processes and outcomes encountered is shared. While at times contentious, the interdisciplinary approach was undoubtedly one of the most critical decisions. This involvement of a diverse group of faculty members allowed for issues regarding instructional preferences and greater curriculum goals of particular teacher education concentration areas to be addressed and infused into the assessment process. Involving various stakeholders contributed to the group's progression from a focus on technical aspects of digital portfolio creation to a focus on communication , application, and articulation of shared expectations. While the creation of a rubric seemed to be a fairly simple task, the attention to institutional, political, and instructional influences was critical. Without paying due attention to these three areas, the university-wide creation, adoption, and impleme n-tation of an interdisciplinary assessment tool specific to the digital environment would have been insignificant to the greater goals of the teacher education program. Overall, the critical influences to the development of the project were the organization and articulation of the teacher education program via the decision points document, the cohesive and collaboratively created portfolio model, and the interdisci-plinary viewpoints that were represented. Though research and evaluation activities associated with this assessment tool are in their infancy within Ball State University, the sharing of knowledge, materials, and resources is thought to be critical to the timely and effective use of digital portfolios within the context of a university-wide contingency of stakeholders. In addition, readers should note that all supportive documents (i.e., Material published as part of this journal, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the publisher of Informing Science. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact Editor@inform.nu to request redistribution permission. Interdisciplinary Digital Portfolio Assessment 42 portfolio model, rubric, etc.) are hyperlinked within the document and available via the Internet.