Helen Bittel
This assignment grew out of a recent overhaul of my British Literature II survey course using backwards design to shift emphasis from coverage of material to student learning. It also aims to better engage the increasing number of nonmajors taking the course for General Education credit, students for whom the purpose and value of studying literature is often not self-evident.
In this final portfolio assignment, students first take each of the four Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs), choose one or two artifacts demonstrating their competency, and write a paragraph explaining how the artifact shows their achievement of the outcome. The artifacts can come from either graded work (low- or higher-stakes assignments) or from in-class work (small group activity answers, exit tickets, personal course notes). Then, they write longer answers to two additional questions: one “big picture” question that the SLOs were designed to help them answer and another question about their own individual learning.
[Editor’s note: A wide variety of online solutions are available for the creation of digital learning portfolios, starting with a simple Google Doc or Microsoft Word file. For more sophisticated options, instructors may want to consider asking students to build portfolios using Google Sites or Wix.com.)
Student responses were strongly positive across varied majors and skill levels; they reported feeling less stress and more control than with a traditional final exam, presentation, or literary analysis paper. Nobody who followed the instructions earned a poor grade, nobody plagiarized, and nearly everyone successfully connected their individual efforts to our shared goals. They were also relatively easy to grade, since for each item, I only needed to evaluate two criteria.
In addition, the SLO-driven final portfolio:
- Implicitly requires students to review everything they did over the semester—in class and at home— in light of what they now know and can do and to demonstrate cumulative learning
- Levels the playing field, in terms of majors and nonmajors. The portfolio requires less knowledge of disciplinary conventions than traditional assessments, and working directly with SLOs is familiar to many pre-professional majors.
- Fosters metacognition, a habit of mind that supports learning well beyond a single course.
- Gives students significant choice in how they demonstrate their learning and unique perspective, and thus ownership of the project
- Makes visible both how course activities are connected to each other through the SLOs and how the work of the course is connected to the big picture of college learning
Helen Bittel is Director of Center for Transformational Teaching and Learning and Associate Professor of English at Marywood University.
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