Portfolios

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PORTFOLIOS

What are portfolios?

To understand the wide range of materials that may go into a portfolio, you should imagine the range between an artist's professional portfolio (that includes only the best example of her work) and an artist's sketchbook (that includes his doodles, mis-starts, imperfections, and detail studies). Somewhere in this range of materials is the portfolio you will complete as part of your Writing Competency requirements.

All portfolios assigned by professors teaching in the Writing Competency at Cabrini College--regardless of how selective or comprehensive their range of materials--are intended to:

Enhance student learning;

Enhance faculty teaching;

Collect student work in a systematic, representative, and comprehensive manner; and

Present this work to an audience evaluating the student's writing abilities.

At a minimum, every course within the Writing Competency requires students to submit an end-of-the-year portfolio (bound together in a folder) with the following elements:

A final draft of the Personal Experience essay;
A final draft of the Expository essay;
A final draft of the Argumentative essay;
A Writing Competency Portfolio Cover Sheet completed for each essay by both the student and the professor; and
An organizational structure which mirrors the chronological sequence in which the essays were assigned: Personal, Expository, and Argumentative.

Why do we use portfolios?

For students, portfolios:

Illustrate the importance of the writing process (you will be required to complete multiple drafts of each assigned essay as you work towards a final version suitable for inclusion in the portfolio);
Build success into the project (you will have opportunity for rethinking and rewriting your essays based on the professor's evaluation of your rough drafts as well as peer evaluations);
Encourage the idea that writing is always being produced for an audience (your portfolio, at a minimum, will be presented not only to your professor, but to the Writing Program Coordinator as well); and
Promote sustained reflection on the Characteristics of Effective Writing (use of the Portfolio Cover Sheet requires that you evaluate how well you did or did not meet the stated expectations of each of the Characteristic).

For Cabrini faculty, portfolios:

Provide evidence of a student's writing competencies under various authentic circumstances (with time for the student to think and re-think the essay and to develop it based on peer and faculty feedback); and
Provide a mechanism for consistently and systematically assessing and/ or grading individual assignments, the student's collected body of work and/ or development over the duration of the course.

For Cabrini as an institution, portfolios:

Enable longitudinal assessments of the effectiveness of the Writing Competency as it has been defined by Cabrini faculty; and

Encourage consistent evaluations of student writing across disciplines by affirming the importance of the analytic rubric that identifies the Characteristics of Effective Writing, the writing process approach, and reflective self-evaluation of student writing.

What happens to portfolios after students turn them in?

Some professors will use them for assessment purposes only. This means that the portfolios:

Permit faculty the opportunity to consider student growth within individual assignments and over the course of the semester;
Provide data on student attainment of the writing competencies; and
Become the working documents of the Institutional Assessment Committee, which is charged with--among other things--establishing that the Writing Competency is meeting its stated aims.

Some professors will use them for grading purposes only. This means that the portfolios:

Encourage faculty to consider each of the Characteristics of Effective Writing when providing the essay's holistic score; and
Provide an opportunity for faculty to grade either select essays from the portfolio (chosen by the professor and/ or the student), the writing process that produced the essay, or some combination of the two.

Some professors will use the portfolios for assessment purposes and grading purposes. Regardless, students will be able to pick up their portfolios from their ENG 100 and SEM 100 professors during the fall semester after the Writing Competency is completed.

Students are encouraged to keep examples of their best work--even from their first year--to include in the professional portfolio they will be assembling throughout their four years at Cabrini in preparation for job interviews and graduate or professional school applications.