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Meredith Anderson
The CSEPP pilot motivated me to add independent projects (something that could make a good artifact) into my laboratory class and make the course more student-centered. For two years my online BIO 101 students had been completing pre-written labs at home to fulfill their laboratory requirement for the class, but I had felt that it would be beneficial to the students to actually develop and carry out an experiment using the scientific method. When I did in fact add an independent project to the course in the fall of 2003, I found the students very much enjoyed the project and performed above my expectations. In the spring of 2004 when the CSEPP pilot began in earnest from the student’s perspective, I added a second project option related to classification of life, and allowed students to choose which project they completed for their final independent project (they all carried out a “scientific method” project at the beginning of he semester). The projects were student-designed and implemented, and I found that students were overall unused to such open-ended assignments but in the end enjoyed the process. Some students even confided that they had never carried out an experiment where they were expected to follow the scientific method up until that point in their academic careers, despite the number of times they recalled learning about the scientific method! After the completion of the independent projects, I think students benefited not only from the process of carrying out and completing them, but also from discovering that they could work independently and on such a large-scale assignment in a college-level science course.
My belief in regards to the process of developing a portfolio is that it is a scaffold on which to hang evidence of educational experiences, and that the experiences themselves are the most crucial part of the student learning process. I also feel that portfolios are useful in that they are a means of conveying student learning to other people (in particular North Central). I also understand that these types of portfolios are essentially going to become a requirement for accreditation in the coming years. Given that last constraint, I would like to see the college use an e-portfolio system, but to do so in a way that emphasizes the artifacts. Using the CSEPP templates, to get to the actual assignment the student completed a person would have to navigate through four levels of web pages! I think three layers within a course portfolio should be the goal – one layer for a student introduction, one layer to describe each artifact and the outcome it relates to and finally the artifact itself. In other words, I think the “outcomes” template and the “artifact” template should be combined into a single layer for each artifact. Similarly, for Gen. Ed. uses of portfolios, I think we should make sure the number of layers between the introductory page and the actual evidence of student learning is kept to a logical minimum, both for the student’s sake and for the sake of the reader. I also think that for course-specific portfolios, no more than one or two artifacts should be required per student per course. Similarly, for Gen. Ed. portfolios, requirements should be kept to the minimum desired by North Central, as the creation of these pages will likely cut into the student’s time (and might even require the addition of a “capstone” course where the students piece together these portfolios before they graduate, which bring up the question, which other course should get tossed from student requirements). So, I guess my take-home opinion is if the college moves toward using Gen. Ed. portfolios (which I’m sure they will J), let’s make sure to use them in as minimalist a form as possible. In this case, “less” will probably be “more.”
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