Journal Article: Portfolios and a Backward Approach to Assessment

Britton, K. & Johannes, J. (2003). Portfolios and a backward approach to assessment. Mathematic teaching in the Middle School School, 9(2), 70-76.

This article was pretty interesting and it did a great job reviewing the strengths and reasons why teachers should adopt the concept of Portfolios. The authors thoroughly explained what exactly is a portfolio and then had different teachers write about how they use portfolios in their classroom. After reading this journal article, I thought the main reason why these authors published this article was to explain the idea that our society needs to start looking at the students growth and what they learned, struggled with, and enjoyed during a unit or span of time. According to our authors, students and parents look so deeply into grades, but in reality what does that A mean? The authors concluded the article by explaining how portfolios help students have pride in their work and show them their learning process from the most basic concepts to the most abstract concepts.

I really enjoyed this article, but I thought a lot of of it was common sense. I am most definitely going to adopt the concept of portfolios in my classrooms, because there are so many positive outcomes from using portfolios. Not only do portfolios help students see their growth, allow the teacher to see what the student has pride in, and shows parents/guardians how their child is doing in school; it also allows students to have pride in all their hard work. There are so many students who dislike school, but having a portfolio to visually show students all their hard work will boost their confidence and hopefully have them enjoy school a little bit more.