Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact

Higher education institutions of all kinds—across the United States and around the world—have rapidly expanded the use of electronic portfolios in a broad range of applications including general education, the major, personal planning, freshman learning communities, advising, assessing, and career planning.Widespread use creates an urgent need to evaluate the implementation and impact of eportfolios. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the contributors to this book—all of whom have been engaged with the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research—have undertaken research on how eportfolios influence learning and the learning environment for students, faculty members, and institutions.This book features emergent results of studies from 20 institutions that have examined effects on student reflection, integrative learning, establishing identity, organizational learning, and designs for learning supported by technology. It also describes how institutions have responded to multiple challenges in eportfolio development, from engaging faculty to going to scale. These studies exemplify how eportfolios can spark disciplinary identity, increase retention, address accountability, improve writing, and contribute to accreditation. The chapters demonstrate the applications of eportfolios at community colleges, small private colleges, comprehensive universities, research universities, and a state system.

Darren Cambridge is Senior Consultant for Education Technology and Online Communities of Practice for the American Institutes for Research.

Kathleen Blake Yancey is Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She has focused her research agenda on portfolios for the life of her career. In 1992, she published Portfolios in the Writing Classroom; in 1996, the co-edited Situating Portfolios, in 2001, the co-edited Electronic Portfolios: Emerging Practices in Student, Faculty and Institutional Learning; and in 2009, the co-edited Electronic Portfolios 2.0: Emergent Research on Implementation and Impact. She has served on the AAC&U VALUE Steering Committee and on the Board of Directors for the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-based Learning (AAEEBL), and she is a faculty member for WASC’s Assessment Leadership Academy and a mentor for WASC’s Community of Practice project. Yancey has also been the president or chair of several writing studies/literacy organizations, including the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA), the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Immediate Past Editor of College Composition and Communication, and past co-editor of the journal Assessing Writing, she has published over 100 refereed articles and book chapters and authored, edited, or co-edited 15 scholarly books, most recently Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing; and A Rhetoric of Reflection. She has been recognized with several awards, including the CWPA Best Book Award, the CCCC Research Impact Award, the FSU Graduate Mentor Award, the FSU Graduate Teaching Award, and the CCCC Exemplar Award.

Barbara Cambridge is Director of the Washington Office of the National Council of Teachers of English.