This article is an analysis of the role of assessment portfolios in teacher learning. Over 18 months, 23 science teachers developed, implemented, and evaluated assessments to track student learning, supported by portfolio tasks and resources, grade-level colleagues, and team facilitators. Evidence of teacher learning included (a) portfolios of a…

This report is an analysis of the role of assessment portfolios in teacher learning. Over 18 months, 19 experienced science teachers worked in grade-level teams to design, implement, and evaluate assessments to track student learning throughout a curriculum unit, supported by semi-structured tasks and resources in assessment portfolios.…

Presents an in-depth look at the design and development of a portfolio-based writing assessment tool intended for use on a daily basis in the classroom. Helps teachers think about the role of assessment in guiding students' narrative writing, with particular emphasis on the connections among curriculum, instruction, and assessment. (RS)

The two articles in this special section, combined with two previous articles, discuss the use of portfolios in large-scale assessment. Ten years ago, there was great interest in portfolio assessment in state testing programs, but no large-scale program relies on portfolios at the present time. These articles continue to consider their uses. (SLD)

This study explored the meaningfulness of "student" scores derived from assessment of student portfolios. Nine elementary teachers documented the instructional support they provided for the writing assignments of each of six target students. Support ratings captured dimensions used to assess students' writing progress…

This article examines one of the challenges to the integration of classroom and large-scale portfolio assessment, a challenge posed by the use of a student's classroom portfolio for large-scale assessment of his or her individual competencies. When work is composed with the support of peers, teachers, and parents, whose work is being judged? The…

This report documents the content and impact of an in-service program designed to enhance elementary school teachers' competence in narrative writing assessment. The program "Writing What You Read" was designed to help teachers and students make substantive assessments of texts. The program, which focused on a portfolio approach, was conducted…

Explores issues of whose work is actually being evaluated when raters outside the classroom context make judgments about students based on work composed with the support of peers, teachers, and parents. Data from an evaluation of a statewide assessment and a study of scoring elementary school writing portfolios illustrate the issues. (SLD)

Portfolio assessment was investigated as a method of evaluating elementary school students' competence in writing. The study comprised an empirical study of the utility and meaningfulness of using a holistic/analytic scoring rubric to score students' portfolios and a qualitative analysis of scoring approaches drawing on raters' critiques of the…

Technical questions regarding the reliability and validity of large-scale portfolio assessment were studied which focused on: (1) whether raters can score collections of writing reliably with rubrics designed for single samples; (2) whether ratings derived from different frameworks differ in their capacities to support technically sound…