![]() ![]() Toward this end, the project is consistent with a larger effort, currently being undertaken by the Provost, to asses and strengthen the general curriculum. The project builds on past efforts, while strengthening the Spelman College academic-support infrastructure to roll out and implement a campus-wide effort that is integrated into the first-year general core requirements and the majors. The effort focuses not only on student development, but on expanding opportunities for faculty to increase their knowledge of advances in the field and to gain the kinds of hands-on training needed to utilize this pedagogical technique effectively in their specific disciplines. Each student’s eFolio will be composed of an interconnected set of artifacts representing diverse goals, achievements, and reflections, thereby allowing the student both to construct and to demonstrate her development as a whole person. The Spelman College eFolio Project (“SpEl.Folio”), a grant-funded initiative currently under review by the Mellon Foundation, is a three-year effort dedicated to using digital technologies to foster students’ ability to think critically about the interconnected elements of their intellectual, professional, and personal development by promoting the opportunity to create a dynamic web-based composition. Margaret Price’s article in the Handbook of Research on ePortfolios. To read more about project outcomes, see Dr. Findings indicate that engagement did rise among students completing eFolios as compared to paper portfolios additional outcomes, not anticipated, were that students reported a rise in self-esteem as well as a rise in the number of potential uses they perceived for their portfolios. Outcomes from the first two years were assessed by means of entry and exit surveys administered to both students and faculty. The third, current, pilot year involves participation by fourteen teachers in various disciplines, including first-year core classes as well as upper-level classes. The second year involved assignment of portfolios in three teachers’ sections (First-Year Composition and Introduction to Computer Science). The first year of the pilot project involved assignment of electronic portfolios in one section of First-Year Composition. Margaret Price about their research of the "Building Virtual Learning Communities" project. Read an article from Across the Disciplines published by Dr. The project’s design of peer-to-peer mentorship and hands-on training has been the element most consistently singled out for positive feedback in participant and external reviews. Another outcome of the “Building Virtual Learning Communities” project was the creation of a strong infrastructure of faculty- and student-based mentorship and training. Faculty and students expressed the belief that work in an electronic medium would help foster student engagement (with faculty attitudes being more uniformly positive than students’).įindings from the focus group sessions helped to inform the design of the 2004 pilot initiative, as did the experience gained by the CWP in the project, funded by the Bush-Hewlett Grant Foundation, titled “Building Virtual Learning Communities.” The key finding from that program was that students and faculty engaging in Web-based authorship should have opportunities to continue these projects for periods longer than one semester (and ideally longer than a year), in order to realize fully such projects’ potential for reflection, revision, and critical thinking.Faculty and students expressed concern that, if an eFolio were required, adequate technical training should be provided.Students tended to regard the paper-based first-year portfolio as something to “get over with” and not as a tool for ongoing learning. ![]() The major points that arose from the focus groups were that: The launch of the pilot was preceded by a series of focus groups with first-year students and faculty across the curriculum in order to assess the effectiveness of the paper-based first-year portfolio and explore student and faculty attitudes toward making a shift to an electronic medium. In 2004, the CWP initiated a pilot project to investigate the possibilities of a shift to an electronic version of the First-Year Portfolio. ![]() The Writing Program sponsors a variety of workshops during the year to help students prepare their portfolios, as well as individual tutoring sessions. The portfolios are assessed by a cross-disciplinary jury of Spelman faculty as well as readers from other institutions of higher learning. Students turn in their portfolios in the spring. ![]() Each student’s portfolio contains a variety of essays from her first year at Spelman, as well as reflective writing. Since 1994, Spelman College’s Comprehensive Writing Program (CWP) has supported an interdisciplinary first-year writing portfolio. ![]()
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