Documenting Learning with ePortfolios: A Guide for College Instructors by Tracy Penny Light, Helen L. Chen, and John C. Ittelson (review)

Documenting Learning with ePortfolios: A Guide for College Instructors explains how electronic portfolios can meet the challenges of reforming higher education toward greater institutional accountability and student engagement.

According to the text, the need to understand the usefulness of electronic, or ePortfolios comes at a critical point in time. Pressure from policymakers, communities, and parents of college-goers have led to increased scrutiny in recent years concerning the investment in U.S. higher education. Across the nation, leaders in education, accrediting bodies, and even the president of the United States call for greater accountability from institutions in ensuring quality in college education. At the same time, the largest stakeholder group—the student population itself—contributes to this pressure on institutions to rationalize absorbent student loan debt through advanced professional opportunities and personal and intellectual development.

To work toward legitimizing the value of a college degree, many institutions have begun adopting electronic portfolios. These ePortfolios have evolved to showcase the academic and co-curricular experiences of students, thus helping faculty to better gauge the degree to which students learn. Documenting Learning starts educators on the path of outlining the people involved, benefits, and challenges in implementing ePortfolio usage.

Within 160 pages, the authors include nine concise chapters grouped in three nearly equal sections: "Documenting Learning with ePortfolios," "Creating and Implementing ePortfolios," and "Practical Considerations for Implementing ePortfolios." Each section adequately incorporates the 79 references and 24 tables and figures, thus providing clarity and substantiation to the case studies presented throughout the text.

The opening section of the book outlines one of the key issues prevalent in colleges and universities across the country—that students lack critical thinking skills despite institutional efforts to hone this core competency (pp. 7-8). This deficiency could be attributed to a fundamental disconnect between the "academic jargon" used in learning outcomes assessment and what students understand about their collegial experiences (p. 70). The authors of Documenting Learning posit that mastery-oriented learning using ePortfolios could be just the mechanism needed to more readily engage students in learning that is deep, transparent, and measurable.

As has been previously understood, ePortfolios can capture on-going and end-term assessment. However the authors take this a step further by describing the use of "folio thinking" pedagogy (p. 8). From a folio-thinking perspective, students can use their ePortfolio as a place to connect seemingly isolated points of knowledge and determine gaps in their learning for further exploration. Using this information, students can be better equipped to explain what they know, how they know it, and what they would like to learn next. Folio thinking not only helps students focus on learning over the span of their lives, but also encourages them to present their learning in a way that makes sense to them. This promising pedagogical approach can assist educators in using ePortfolio tools to nurture student ownership over their own learning and identify critical thinking skills attainment.

The authors describe the practice of folio thinking in detail in the first two sections of the text, using those descriptions as the basis for connecting several models and taxonomies of learning to ePortfolio, such as Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain, Fink's taxonomy of significant learning, and Baxter Magolda's model of developmental foundations of learning outcomes. For instance, Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain helps to identify the various levels of learning that aid instructors in determining when students are ready to move from consuming information to synthesizing their learning (p. 47). They use Fink's taxonomy of significant learning to reinforce the overall point that faculty instructors need to be more intentional in engaging learners in their own learning (p. 42). Finally, they use Baxter Magolda's work on self-authorship to emphasize the need to help learners better structure and...