Portfolio Project
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Questions About Portfolios
What is a "Liberal Arts and Sciences Portfolio?"
How do I start and maintain a portfolio?
What will the university look at in my portfolio?
Why should I maintain a portfolio?
How might the University use my portfolio?
What is a "Portfolio?"
A portfolio is a collection of materials representative of your work, skills, ideas, and values. A portfolio that has been maintained for a while will reflect growth in your thinking, an evolution in your skills, and changes in your attitudes.
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What is a "Liberal Arts and Sciences Portfolio?"
Each year graduating seniors are expected to provide a collection of works that is a subset of their larger portfolio. This is known as the University's "Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) Portfolio."
More specifically, the LAS portfolio consists of several items fulfilling specific "categories." Typically, each major has a senior capstone course in which the university portfolio is administered. You will be asked to find appropriate items from your larger personal portfolio, complete the prompts for each category and submit these things in digital format.
The LAS portfolio is a dynamic and evolving project, and it is impossible to know what the specific categories will be when you are a senior, but you should expect that it will include critical thinking, interdisciplinary thinking, a most personally satisfying experience while at Truman, and evidence of competence in the “modes of inquiry.” Feel free to review the current prompts on this website to get a sense of what students are asked to submit.
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How do I start and maintain a portfolio?
In the beginning, it is difficult to know what to keep as part of your developing portfolio. The best advice is to SAVE AND ORGANIZE EVERYTHING. It is wise to keep multiple copies of items, since diskettes and hard drives may fail. A good practice is to create a directory on your Y drive (such as one labeled “Portfolio”) and to store your work on the network. It is also a good practice to backup those documents to a CD-ROM or other permanent media on a regular basis.
In addition to electronic documents/artifacts produced for courses, you should save anything else that might represent you "in process": copies of letters home; audio and video tapes of speeches or performances; early and final drafts of essays, papers, labs, etc.; exams; notebooks; logs and journals; your original artwork, films, photography, or layout design; your creative writing; E-mail texts; web pages you designed; theater or performance programs. In short, value and keep anything that represents you as an active learner and shaper of experience. Keep hard copies of works as well as computer diskettes. Frequently, seniors report difficulty in producing some work they did because their diskette was corrupted, or the work was originally written and stored on diskette using software that is no longer available.
Date the materials you keep, and be sure to jot down where, why, when, and how you generated them. Then, when you want to review your collection, the chronology of works may provide some insights.
Review and update your portfolio regularly. After each semester, reserve a little time to peruse your collection. Sort and add new materials from the semester just ending, and revisit and reorganize the older materials.
Be a packrat! Keep everything at first, not just those works with high grades, so that you will have an abundance to mull over as you cull and select material for particular occasions. You can gain a more complete view of you and your growth when you have a lot of "data" to analyze.
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What will the university look at in my portfolio?
Every year, right after spring graduation, a number of faculty (about sixty in recent years) read (or view, or listen to) and evaluate items from the LAS portfolios collected that year. Evaluating LAS portfolios is one way we grade the institution in order to gauge how we are doing in providing the best education possible for students. We look in the portfolios for patterns in student learning and for the effects of the Truman environment on those outcomes. It is important you know that while we are evaluating your works, we are really assessing the institution. With such an assessment, the University is not making a judgment about your personal achievement. The results of the evaluation of your portfolio do not become part of your academic transcript and are never reported to anyone with individual student names attached. Rather, we look at collective data statistically and use that data to improve the Truman experience. Since the portfolio assessment is about a decade old, it is fair to say that your education is enhanced by the efforts of your predecessors as they prepared and submitted LAS portfolios.
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Why should I maintain a portfolio?
A portfolio gives you unique opportunities to think about your thinking: to look at your responses to the many intellectual challenges you meet at Truman. It lets you assess what you have learned and decide what, how, when, and where you want to learn further. It helps you to discover more about yourself while you grow stronger as a learner, as an individual, and as a citizen of the world.
Your portfolio can help you to reflect on your works in progress and make judgments about the quality of your work. It may help you in setting goals for particular courses and social activities, in planning your future studies, in narrowing your career goals, and in pursuing your ideals. It may remind you of who you were as you entered the university community and may reflect, to you and other readers of your portfolio, who you are becoming.
In cover letters that accompanied the LAS portfolios, seniors described to faculty their thinking, the value to them of individual works, and the self-assessment they conducted as they assembled the portfolios. They talked both about how they selected the items they submitted and about what they learned through the process. You may wish to look at the Assessment Almanac on-line to see what students have said.
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How can I use the portfolio?
Use it to look backward and forward. Use the information it contains to reflect on changes and growth, and to set goals and strategies for future endeavors. Use it to remind yourself of things you want to investigate further and to help you decide on future course work.
Use it as a sourcebook of ideas for speeches, research projects, conversations, creative projects and writings.
Think about your portfolio when you meet with your advisor. The two of you could use it as you survey your interests and learning skills; plan your academic career; chat about your experiences across the curriculum; seek placement in some programs; apply for summer internships or other awards. Use it when thinking about life after Truman. It can be helpful in shaping a resume, planning for graduate school, or applying for your first career position
Share your portfolio with instructors when you seek their advice regarding coursework or when you need to request letters of recommendation.
Use your portfolio to identify strengths you can highlight in the résumés you draft or in the personal statements you might write when you apply for scholarships, grant applications, graduate schools or jobs.
Share your portfolio with relatives, friends or former teachers.
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How might the University use my portfolio?
What is most important to the University is that you use your portfolio for self-assessment and continuous improvement. As several of the quoted letters indicate, when you maintain a collection for a portfolio, you find unique opportunities for reflection, self-assessment, and personal goal setting. Using your portfolio for reflection is a habit that fosters lifelong learning and growth.
Within disciplines, portfolios are important for professional growth. Traditionally, Art majors create capstone art portfolios over their years at Truman that include videotaping of their performance and product, of reflective writing about their art and aesthetics, and of artworks they created. Political Science majors present their portfolios to faculty during their senior year as a prompt for broad-ranging interviews with faculty members. Students who plan on careers in technical writing, in computer programming and systems analysis, and in print or broadcast journalism build portfolios to present during job interviews. Often their instructors assist them in making "final cuts."
The English faculty requires portfolios as part of the admissions process to the MAE (Master of Arts in Education) in secondary education. Nationwide, many graduate programs ask to see a portfolio as part of the admissions process. You can talk with your advisor about shaping such a portfolio.
Truman uses LAS portfolio assessment to scan the liberal arts and sciences environment and to reflect on the effectiveness and quality of the curriculum. This kind of assessment focuses on the nature and success of student learning through the qualitative measures of viewing (and hearing) a variety of submissions by a student.
Each year in May, the Portfolio Project Team, comprised of about sixty faculty members from all disciplines and ranks, reads portfolios to learn more about students' experiences with the liberal arts and sciences in the core curriculum, in the major, and within the Truman milieu. Items in every portfolio are read and evaluated by faculty members. Faculty readers work together and pause frequently to discuss significant findings and trends. Typically, those faculty members who participate in reading portfolios cite the experience as one of the most enlightening and useful activities in which they have engaged. It provides them with a panoramic view of students' skills, knowledge and attitudes, which they often fail to encounter when working within the confines of their own discipline. Imagine your English Composition teacher reading your biology lab report, or your Accounting professor thinking about your research paper from a World History class. Perhaps the most significant use of portfolios is the transformation they engender in the faculty readers who approach their classes with a lot of new insight gained from reading and discussing portfolios.
Specific findings of the Task Force are published annually in Truman's three-volume Assessment Almanac, which is available to any member of the Truman community through this website or in hard copy from the office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs. Additionally, findings are shared with faculty and administrators through planning workshops, faculty development luncheons, and through various other workshops and reports.
The Undergraduate Council (which has the responsibility for overseeing and evaluating the undergraduate curriculum) looked at six years of findings while it discussed core reform and developed the Liberal Studies Program (LSP). The Junior Interdisciplinary Seminar course, required in the LSP, is one significant outcome linked to portfolio assessment.
Both Faculty Senate and Student Senate consider the data when they draft planning documents. In 1997, the University published a ten-year master plan entitled Affirming the Promise: An Agenda for Excellence in the 21st Century, setting out guiding principles and goals for Truman. The development of the master plan relied heavily on assessment data.
Individual disciplines receive an annual report on the portfolio findings for students in their major, which they are encouraged to consider when reforming their curriculum and improving their programs. For example, the Nursing faculty reviewed and discussed interdisciplinary submissions from past portfolios and the data about their own graduates as part of a retreat they held between semesters to think about the connections of their major and the Liberal Studies Program (LSP). The Art faculty met to look at the data about aesthetic analysis and evaluation to think about the ways they assist students, both in their major courses and in the LSP, in fostering the aesthetic mode of inquiry.
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