The overall assessment of teacher education students by means of testing may not be the best indicator of competence in a professional field. Assessors must possess both valid and reliable ways of discerning which students have the necessary skills to be effective in the classroom. Portfolio analysis is one way to get better, more valid data about teacher education majors and to focus on skills and behaviors that are most important to the development of quality teachers. This paper defines portfolios and how they enrich assessment, offers guidelines and examples for the use of portfolios, highlights some major problems, and reports results from teacher education majors who have used portfolios. A portfolio is defined as a method of exhibiting a person's learning over time, making a broad-based rather than a narrow evaluation, and using a variety of data sources and methods for data collection. The document concludes with implications for teacher education, suggesting that evaluations be authentic rather than artificial and narrow, include a variety of measures rather than single scores, be kept longitudinally, evidence a sense of striving to improve upon past efforts, and be developmental rather than summative. An appendix provides examples from education majors' practicum portfolios. (LL)