Using Student Portfolios To Reflect an Understanding of AAI

A portfolio is a purposeful, integrated collection of student work showing effort, progress, or achievement in one or more areas.

--Northwest Evaluation Association, 1991

Several academy teachers have long been advocates of the use of student portfolios. With an almost missionary zeal, they have encouraged their use throughout the academy. While not every academy teacher uses portfolio assessment, most now do, and students develop portfolios in English, history, science, and math, as well as developing Work-Based Learning and Career-Technical Assessment Portfolios. We gradually refine our own standards and performance criteria for both small portfolios and for an all-encompassing academy portfolio which students begin when they enter the academy and which they carry with them into their adult futures.

We were fortunate to work with the San Francisco-based Far West Laboratory to field test Career-Technical Assessment Portfolios (C-TAP), Projects, and Scenarios. Our involvement with the C-TAP enhanced our understanding of the power and potential of portfolios and raised the level of the discussion both among teachers and between teachers and students about learning processes and assessment. The Far West Laboratory C-TAP requires the following:

• Introduction which includes a table of contents and a letter in which students present themselves and their portfolio work
• Career Development Package which includes applications for employment and college, a cover letter, a résumé, and letters of recommendation (the academy also requires a Career I-Search and an Individual Career Plan)
• Work Samples which showcase important demonstrations of mastery of career-technical skills (each work sample is introduced by reflective student writing which provides a summary of knowledge and skills demonstrated, of the learning processes involved, and a self-assessment with regard to quality and growth. Work samples are tied to Health Care Standards as well as AAI and SCANS)
• Research Write-up which investigates a health/bioscience topic or issue
• Supervised Practical Experience Evaluation in which an employer/supervisor evaluates a student's worksite career development

Students begin a C-TAP in the tenth grade, but complete the bulk of their work samples and academy career practice in the eleventh grade. In their Junior Academy English classes, students spend time refining their C-TAPs, and then use them to showcase the knowledge and skills they have mastered and the work they can do. Students present their portfolios to prospective employers when they interview for Academy Summer Internships. Most students personalize their portfolios. Student include photographs of themselves at the worksite, projects they have done, copies of their transcripts, letters of appreciation, samples of interdisciplinary projects, certificates of accomplishment and mastery (e.g., First Aid, CPR, medical terminology, computer applications and so on), community service awards, perfect attendance awards, student-produced pamphlets and newsletters, research write-ups, their best work related to health or bioscience from their classes, and more. They often design special covers and add plastic cover sheets and fancy indexes. We emphasize the creation of a professional product which will have future supervisors and employers (and perhaps postsecondary institutions) as its audience.

Over the course of last year, we began to use portfolios to explicitly explore AAI. With student assistance, we developed clearly stated definitions and examples of each of the aspects of industry and then asked them to create portfolio work samples which demonstrated their knowledge, understanding, and application of these specific aspects in the health care industry. We also developed a Work-Based Learning Portfolio requirement for students engaged in direct inquiry into various aspects of the health industry in the context of a medical center and a major health maintenance organization facility.

The academy's Work-Based Learning Portfolio accompanies the structured Career Exploration experiences that eleventh-grade students have at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente Regional Offices (previously described). Each student's Work-Based Learning Portfolio tells the story of his or her work-based learning experiences. Work-Based Learning Portfolios include field notes, journal entries, interviews, work-based learning assignments and projects, evaluations, and records of mastery, as well as specific AAI work samples. Work-based learning has always been an essential component of the Academy experience; however, in the last few years, the strengthened partnership with Kaiser Permanente has offered students and teachers amazing opportunities for connecting school and work on a regular and ongoing basis. Eleventh graders can spend a full or half day every two weeks in structured, interactive Career Explorations (job shadowing experiences) in which students use a portfolio approach to focus their learning.

Demonstration of AAI knowledge through the Work-Based Learning Portfolio can take many different forms. For example, a student might use several visits to the Neonatal Intensive Care Department to explore the management structure of a clinical department or how that particular department uses planning. Or a student might do a photo essay on health and safety precautions in the genetics lab as part of an AAI work sample. Or a student might interview a lawyer from the Kaiser Permanente Legal Department about the legal aspects of medical ethics and then respond to a case study the department provides. Students look at everything from accreditation to facilities management to nutrition to social services. Students explore the hospital as one might a city, except that they are better prepared than most travelers and have excellent guides in their worksite hosts, teachers, and in the structure provided for the career explorations.

We were pleasantly surprised by the strong sense of professionalism and efficacy that students brought to the Work-Based Learning Portfolios. They approached the AAI requirements with a clear sense that what they were being asked to do built on what they already knew and was worth doing. A few students complained--as students sometimes do--about the quantity of work expected, but all of the students felt that the work they did both increased their knowledge and understanding of the health industry as a whole and allowed them to demonstrate what they learned at the workplace. By building in opportunities for students to reflect on the learning process and make assessments of themselves as learners during their career exploration experiences, we were able to witness the students as they sought to create patterns, articulate their thinking on complex experiences, internalize AAI criteria, and navigate a course from novice to mastery. Some of what we required of them was overwhelming; some was too structured, but the combination of portfolios, projects, and reflective seminars as strong connectors for the classroom and the worksite had impressive payoffs.

We are still in the pilot stage of the Work-Based Learning Portfolio. One of our challenges is to develop an assessment rubric for Work-Based Learning Portfolios that honors the uniqueness of each student's learning experience and simultaneously documents the part that career exploration plays in a student's progression from health career novice to health career expert.

Lessons Learned

• We walk a delicate line if we use prepackaged materials and/or too formal requirements for student portfolios. Exploration and the spirit of student ownership and empowerment need to guide our work.

• We need to balance the use of portfolios for assessment with their use for instructional purposes. Purpose affects design. Assessment portfolios tend to belong to the institution, to be more structured, to use performance criteria to monitor student growth, and to require more teacher and employer management; instructional portfolios tend to belong to the student, to be less structured, to use performance criteria for student self-reflection, and to require more time and management skills for students. Possibly the best portfolios are combinations of both.

• We cannot underestimate the value of clearly stated, quality performance criteria for AAI entries in the portfolios and the importance of teaching students how to use these criteria in helping to shape the work they do.

• We need to approach portfolio design and assessment as a "community of learners" and to engage teachers, students, employers, employees, and postsecondary institutions in the process. Only by doing so can we assure that employers and colleges value the student work and portfolios that result.