Portfolio assessment

Published on 01/06/2015 by admin

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Last modified 01/06/2015

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31 Portfolio assessment

Portfolio assessment is a response to changes in medical education including the emphasis on professionalism and the need to give students more responsibility for their own learning.

What is a portfolio?

A portfolio is a collection of evidence that learning has taken place. It is cumulative in the sense that it contains work collected over a period of time rather than the snapshot view obtained with the traditional examination. It is important to appreciate that a portfolio is different from a logbook. In a portfolio the learner’s experiences are recorded but also included are reflections on the experiences and a description of the further learning that has resulted.

The portfolio is likely to contain both quantitative graded evidence as well as qualitative descriptions. Students actively collect and select the material for their portfolio which will provide the examiner with evidence of their learning. Portfolios may include evidence of the practical procedures carried out by the student, videotapes of their clinical experiences, evaluations of their abilities in written assessments and reports by clinicians on the student’s clinical attachments. Multi-source feedback from nurses, other members of the healthcare team and patients may be included. The students individualise their portfolio by selecting the evidence relating to their own personal experience. The evidence included in a portfolio is limited only by the degree of the designer’s creativity.

Why portfolios?

As described in the previous chapter, in the 1970s there was a switch of emphasis from an assessment of students’ knowledge to an assessment of their clinical skills including history taking, physical examination and practical procedures. Tools such as the objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) were developed for this purpose. The more recent move to outcome-based education with an emphasis on learning outcomes such as attitudes, professionalism, reflection and self-assessment created the need for a tool that provided a more valid assessment in these areas. There was a need too for an assessment tool that counteracted a reductionist approach to assessment and which provided a more holistic and overall assessment of a student’s competence.

My (RMH) daughter completed two honours degree courses. One was in mathematics and computing and the other in fashion design. She was in no doubt that the assessment method used in her fashion course – portfolio assessment – was much more searching and accurate, and fairer as an assessment of competence in a professional area, than the more traditional examinations used in the mathematics and computing course. Her fashion portfolio contained evidence of work completed during her studies and her reflections on this. It contained evidence of the technical and inter-personal skills she had acquired during her training and demonstrated her understanding of the theory that underpinned the work. Talking with her, the potential value of a portfolio as an assessment tool in medicine was apparent.

Portfolios, which for many years have been used in the arts, are now having a major impact as an assessment tool in medicine. The use of portfolios for learning and assessment has now become widespread in medicine and other healthcare professions. Portfolios are an authentic learning and assessment tool that relates to the work of a doctor and reflects a holistic and integrated approach to medical practice.

Advantages

Portfolios offer a number of advantages as an assessment tool:

• Outcomes and competencies can be assessed that other tools have difficulty in reaching. These may be skills necessary for life-long learning such as self-assessment, reflection and the adoption of appropriate learning strategies. They provide a tool to assess attitudes and professionalism.

• Portfolios include evidence collected over a period of time and provide an overall and holistic view of a student’s competence.

• With the range of quantitative and qualitative evidence included and the triangulation from the different sources of evidence, portfolios provide a comprehensive and reliable interpretation of a student’s achievement.

• Portfolios represent a personalised approach to assessment, focusing on what individual students achieve in contrast to the more standardised approach with instruments such as the OSCE.

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