Teachers and Students’ Perceptions regarding Portfolio

I am going to mention some ideas and statements taken from the article ‘Teachers and Students’ Perceptions regarding Portfolio Assessment in an EFL context’, which I found relevant and useful for us to have a general idea about the uses of portfolios in a real classroom. After that, I am going to summarize briefly what the research was about.

•  Portfolios have started to control the assessment system in schools.
• The usage of portfolios simultaneously with the standardized tests in the schools, enhance motivation, engender individualized and collaborative learning and inculcates a sense of responsibility and that it lets new ideas germinate in language learner’s mind.
•  Portfolios are defined as a purposeful collection of examples of learning collected over a period of time.
•  Portfolios promote autonomy of learners.
• Portfolios present teachers a fragmentary picture of the process that students have been going through.

The article ‘Teachers and Students’ Perceptions regarding Portfolio  Assessment in an EFL context’  studied the underlying notion of portfolio held in the school, setting, sampling, data collection, instruments and data analysis in detail. Also, the research presents the content of portfolios and how the portfolios system is conducted at the preparatory school. It focuses on teachers and students’ opinions about pros and cons of portfolios.

Results:

1.   Time urgency: Portfolio is held every week in addition to the exams conducted once every two weeks.
2.  . The objectivity of scoring system: While assessing portfolio presentation, teachers have the opportunity to grade 4 skills (listening, grammar, vocabulary and writing).
3.   Seminars: Teachers need training seminars and conferences about the usages of portfolios. 
4.   The carrying of bulky materials: Teachers expressed that carrying or storing the bulky materials was a trouble to them.
5.    The teachers’ role in determining the content of portfolio: Portfolio content should be selected cooperatively and fastidiously.

Conclusions:

•    Portfolio assessment be performed effectively and even be a component of the passing grade.
•    It should not be forgotten that when students are under time urgency, the system’s reliability is deemed highly dubious by teachers and learners.
•     Portfolio should be performed, because it is an influential assessment.

In our last class we had an interesting presentation about a chapter called “A framework for evaluation”. The part that called my attention was the final activity, the idea was to read and act out one possible situation we can face in a real classroom.  We had to performance the situation, give it a solution and our partners had to guess what the situation was about.

The case, my group had to performance, was about 9th graders students who had to read a book. The thing was that the students did not understand many vocabulary and idioms present in the book. We, as teacher, can face this situation in our classroom and we have to be able to give a quick and useful solution.

My classmates and my professor discussed this particular case and we could get some possible and useful strategies which can help us, as teacher, dealing with this:

·         It is not a good idea to change the book.  The teacher can teach his/her students an excellent strategy for reading.  Skimming: the teacher asks his/ her students to read the book trying to get the general idea of a paragraph, avoiding specific details and some words they do not understand.

·         It is good idea to take some time to read the book in the class, so the teacher can provide students some help.

·         Students can read the book in groups, so they can share ideas and also, by context they can get some meanings.