Encouraging students to try new skills

The Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program—UWB’s largest program—sought to develop a course that used flexible content (drawing on individual faculty members’ interests and strengths) while orienting new students to interdisciplinary methods and rigorous academic skills, such as

•Critical reading;•Research and writing;•Collaboration with peers.

The resultant course is BIS 300: Interdisciplinary Inquiry. In my sections of the course, rather than assess each piece of work submitted after students' first attempts at new skills, I use portfolios to emphasize practice and revision.

AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Becky Rosenberg for her continuing consultations regarding the use of portfolios, Andreas Brockhaus for assistance with technology, and Marc Studer for assistance with the poster.

ePortfolios

•Students submit works in progress, typically at mid-quarter (fig. 1-2).•Instructor provides feedback and suggestions directly in ePortfolio (fig. 3).•Student revises work according to suggestions.•Instructor provides final comments and grade (fig. 4).

Benefits of ePortfolios

• Pedagogical rationale• Students get time to develop as thinkers and

writers, with our feedback, before being graded.

• Students learn more when they have the opportunity and motivation to reflect upon their work. Reflection deepens their learning and helps them connect course content with the world beyond the course.

• Mistakes are crucial for learning. Portfolios help avoid punishing students for mistakes.

• Advantages for teachers• We can focus on critical thinking and writing

and other academic work as processes.• We can assume the role of coach—on the

student’s side—rather than judge (until the end of the course).

• We can distribute our work load more evenly through a quarter.

• We see better work from students by the end of a course.

• We can give more meaningful feedback (“formative evaluation”) throughout a course rather than handing out premature and oversimplifying grades (“summative evaluation”).

• We spend time more effectively, with much better results.

• Advantages of ePortfolios• Access work from anywhere in the world.• We can more easily cut and paste distinctive

passages from a student’s paper into Google if I suspect plagiarism.

• Microsoft Word “Properties” shows when the document was first created and how much time was spent writing and revising it.

Using ePortfolios in a Program Core Course David S. Goldstein, Ph.D.

Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, UW Bothell

For further informationA two-page list of print and online resources for using ePortfolios is available for download at: http://tinyurl.com/2ffjj6.Please feel free to contact me at davidgs@u.washington..edu.

The course: BIS 300

Learning objectives:

•Understand and appreciate the interdisciplinary production of knowledge and the ways in which it underwrites different aspects of the IAS Program; •Gain a critical understanding of the IAS Program's diverse and interrelated (inter)disciplinary fields and methods of inquiry; •Become better critical thinkers and writers, capable of posing, answering, and reposing a variety of complex questions; •Become better researchers, able to use the resources at UWB and elsewhere in order to identify existing and complementary scholarly work while producing original knowledge through data gathering and interpretation; •Become better speakers, able to communicate clearly and engagingly about complicated topics, arguments, and issues; •Become better collaborators as learners, researchers, and teachers.

Fig. 1. Main menu. Fig. 2. Midquarter essay submission.

Fig. 3. Instructor adds comments.

Fig. 4. Final portfolio shows all instructor comments.

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