Making Connections

Tracy Penny Light (Department of History)

The University of Waterloo is in the process of implementing the Competency Portfolio Project, under the auspices of the Associate Vice-President, Learning Resources & Innovation (AVP-LRI) initiative. Since the fall of 2004, the project has aimed to integrate ePortfolios with particular subject areas in order to help students demonstrate and document their competencies within a given domain (i.e. history, teaching excellence, professional development) and to make connections through reflection between what they learn in different contexts (academic, workplace, community). Professors involved in the effort also seek to study the learning impact of creating ePortfolios.

Professor Tracy Penny Light has piloted the KEEP Toolkit as an ePortfolio tool in a history course for non-majors to both assess student learning and to examine how the ePortfolio helps students to develop and demonstrate competencies for “doing history” (critical thinking and analysis) over the course of the semester. She demonstrates the format and usefulness of ePortfolios by sharing her teaching portfolio, which documents her competency as higher education teacher. Her students can use this model as well as past student examples as they begin to integrate their knowledge, documenting their own competency in history.

Teaching in Higher Education Competency Portfolio
Tracy Penny Light, Ph.D.

In order to focus her students’ portfolios on critical thinking in history and to help students see their development of critical thinking abilities, Professor Penny-Light provides a series of tasks to help students see and reflect on the thinking she wants students to do. She asks students on the first day of class to do a “pre-flection,” responding to the question: what do you think “doing history” is? She then follows this assignment with a series of discussions about historical interpretation of primary and secondary sources and has students regularly practice thinking critically about the materials she presents. They respond again to the question about “doing history” in the middle of the term and at the end.

The course involves viewing films and reviewing a variety of primary and secondary historical sources. At the reading or viewing of each piece of material, Professor Penny-Light asks students to ask themselves “What does this tell me about the history of a certain time and place? If it is a secondary source, what is this historian’s interpretation of this event? If it is a primary source, what is my interpretation? Why am I interpreting it in this way?” The class then discusses their answers, coming to no definitive conclusion except that this kind of thinking is always necessary in historical interpretation.

As students answer these questions and collect their responses, they engage in other assignments. They complete a brief interpretive exercise, develop an outline for their research project and work toward a final version of a project that explores a topic of interest for them. All of these “product” assignments include a process statement by them indicating the thinking that went into their research and interpretations. Students also participate in discussions about the history throughout the term in small groups to develop their historical thinking.

Critical Thinking ePortfolio
History

Professor Penny-Light provides formative and substantive feedback on her students’ work as they develop their research projects, and their thinking. At the end of the course students determine what will be assessed for a grade by submitting particular materials for their final ePortfolios.

The portfolio students compose at the end of the term can include any pieces of their terms’ work. They must, however, include pieces that provide evidence of their ability to “do” history and they must include a final reflection and response to the question, “What is history?” Some students include the research project while others contribute a series of their reflections on the various films viewed over the term . In all cases, students get to say, “Here’s my best work,” submitting the pieces they want Professor Penny-Light to grade.

Professor Penny-Light has the students create a KEEP Toolkit account at the beginning of her course, when she presents her own portfolio. She explains briefly to her students that it will be necessary to carefully keep track of all of their coursework as well as her comments. Toward the middle of the course, she presents them with prompts to use to create their portfolios and a possible template to use. She finds that if she doesn’t provide a template, she’s “looking at wildly different things and it takes a long to time to mark. However, the template also still allows creativity.” This combination of ease of marking and student creativity is invaluable to her.

Professor Penny-Light has used the KEEP Toolkit to help her students create learning portfolios. The reflective action of pulling together and displaying one’s work has helped her non-history major students understand and demonstrate the practice of history. "We know that students learn skills in different contexts and see the Electronic Portfolio (ePortfolio) as providing them with the opportunity to articulate and connect their learning in many different ways. Most importantly, their ePortfolios will allow them to not only “show” but to demonstrate concretely what they know to the world.”

Because she has 150 students in her course, in the fall of 2005 she is introducing a peer-review process in the portfolio building assignment. She will mix 1st-4th year students in small groups and have students review one another’s portfolios. She predicts that they will use what they learn from their peers to improve the presentation of their own work as well as better articulate what it means to think like a historian.

The Competency Portfolio Project involves several other departments, which are using or plan to use the KEEP Toolkit for their students’ documentation of particular skills and competencies. As a part of the University of Waterloo's co-op education program, Accounting and Financial Management students are building on their academic competencies as they develop their professional skills. Residence Dons (teachers and leaders) are using the toolkit to document the unique skill-set that they acquire in their role (community). Within each of these programs, learners are encouraged to reflect on their experiences in all three contexts.

Accounting and Financial Management ePortfolio
Margarita de Guzman

Other programs and departments such as the Masters in Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program, Kinesiology, and Biology departments plan to incorporate an ePortfolio component soon. “In terms of professional practice (specifically, accounting), ePortfolios provide students with a way to document and demonstrate their competency in skills, which their profession has deemed to be important. Rather than a line on a resume that says a student possesses a skill, ePortfolios allow students to show examples of their work to demonstrate their competency", said Penny Light of the integration of ePortfolios. Eventually, students will build one comprehensive portfolio, demonstrating the learning, competencies, and skills they acquired over time and in various classes and contexts.

The University of Waterloo sees the student ePortfolio as more than a simple collection of artifacts. It is a reflective perspective on what an individual has learned over time in a diverse range of learning contexts. The evidence of learning and knowledge within the ePortfolio will be consistently accompanied by reflections that connect to the student's overall learning experience. “The ePortfolio provides students the opportunity to clearly articulate their knowledge and skills in different environments as well as to identify areas for future learning or improvement. This process of collecting, sifting, and reflecting allows learners to develop a more holistic conception of their learning and of opportunities for learning. As a result, they might use the knowledge gained through creating their ePortfolio to better integrate their diverse learning experiences,” explains Professor Penny-Light.

The Competency Portfolio Project plans to follow students from their academic life to their co-operative work terms and back again to track how their portfolios evolve over time. The goal is to leverage the ePortfolio to assist students to better integrate their various learning experiences, which will then make them more competitive on the job market.