Student Portfolios

In his book, Reading Reminders, Jim Burke discusses ways to develop guidelines for student portfolios. His guidelines enabled me to see the portfolio in  a different way and to understand how it could be more fully used to represent student work. I have been striving to develop writing portfolios with students that reflects not only the students growth, but also the work that was involved in achieving growth. Student writing portfolios include multiple drafts of pieces of writing from different genres which do mark growth, but this writing portfolio is usually the only type of portfolio that students come away with.

Burke's model includes different types of data for both formal and informal assessment of student growth in reading, but the concepts can be applied to both reading and writing. 

Some examples of things to include in a reading portfolio:

• an annotated bibliography of what students have read
• before and after reading surveys
• reflective essay on their progress, feelings, and attitudes about reading during the year
• scores from reading tests (class, district, state)
• reading goals (revised throughout the year)
• reading autobiography
• example close reading of a text
• cover letter introducing contents
• different types of responses to reading (including creative responses)

For more, see Jim Burke's Reading Reminders, "#35". 

Creating a digital portfolios may be a good way to ensure that the work students have created lasts and can be easily shared and accessed in the future.

See also:
To create digital surveys
For more on free apps to create digital portfolios
Also consider live binders