Portfolios, Assessment and Institutions: An Interim Report.
Hugh Nicoll
Nicoll distributed copies of self-evaluation forms and explained how he uses portfolios in his reading classes at a small aspiring Liberal Arts college doggedly pursuing its perceived vocation as a teaching institution in the face of pressure to pursue grant money and the blurring line between "standards" and "standardization". He offered various meanings of portfolios-- and a picture of one, pointing out that quasi-privatization and the politics of pedagogy and research have put teachers between a rock and a hard place, looking for alternatives to TOEIC for language assessment.

• Growing out of the student autonomy movement, Common European Frame of Reference (CEFF) and European Language Portfolios (ELP) using dossiers, self-regulation, life-long learning and can-do statements, are models for the Personal Assessment Checklist System project. PACS is about rationales, goals and constraints; pilot data gathering for English and IT courses; and building systems, where students answer questions with their cell-phones (fun for students and easier for teachers) and self-assess their burgeoning language skills and confidence with Likert scales.
• There was some discussion of how other teachers used methods similar to portfolios for their classroom and coursework organization— with alternatives and improvements offered by Nicoll's research.
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