Green Squiggly Lines:

Self Assessment, Reflection, and a Wider Audience

Portfolio assessment-and to a greater extent electronic portfolio assessment-provides a bulk work, a means of resisting the definition of student writing as product only, as primarily about issues of correctness and form. As Kathleen Yancey wrote,

Portfolio pedagogy requires that everyone participate. Students in this classroom are required to be active learners, they must make choices that will affect and direct their learning, and they will learn more or less in part according to the choices they make. They are participants in the classroom, not just to help the teacher help them-thought that too is important-but also to help themselves. Put differently, they are responsible for their own learning. (1992, p. 16)

Students' responsibility (accountability?) for their own learning is very different from what happens when a piece of software corrects students' surface errors. In the portfolio model, which expands out to include electronic portfolios, a student is collecting, selecting, and reflecting on her own work. She is engaged in a global, macro-level evaluation of her writing and learning.