Portfolio Assessment and Descriptive Writing

Portfolios have been most widely used in the teaching of reading and writing, with a strong focus on classroom instruction, student ownership and self-evaluation, and teacher autonomy (Carter et al., 1991; Graves, 1983). More recently, portfolios have been proposed and adopted as statewide student assessment management tools in addition to or instead of standardized achievement test data (Baron, 1992; Brewer, 1990; O'Neil, 1992; Rothman, 1990). Provided that the purpose of portfolio contents is to expand understanding of a student's growth based on multiple measures, different kinds of test and non-test data can be included in a portfolio. Portfolios might also contain required information for state- or district- wide systems, but these data need not dominate or divert portfolio assessment from being used to inform classroom instruction (Paesani, 2006).