TEACHER PERCEPTIONS OF PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT: DO THEY DIFFER
DEPENDING UPON WHETHER TEACHERS HAVE HAD EXPERIENCE WITH THE
Daresh and Playko (1995) report that for at least two decades, educators have been advocating the use of portfolio assessments for teacher evaluation purposes. In this regard, the authors report that it has been argued that the use of portfolios for the preparation, evaluation, and continuing professional development of teachers promotes more effective and intensive continued learning among educators. However, despite this advocation of the portfolio assessment process, research conducted by Loup (1996) on the amount of educational change that has taken place over the last two decades in the 100 largest United States school districts, suggests that the teacher portfolio assessment process has not been incorporated into most of the country's major schools.
According to Brogan (1995), one of the major reasons that schools have not adopted portfolio assessment is that there is often reluctance or resistance on the part of teachers to accept this new form of assessment. Most teachers do not understand its usefulness or its importance; furthermore, many view it only as another task or work assignment taking them away from the act of teaching.
Given the foregoing, it seems reasonable to claim here that if teachers had some experience with portfolio assessment, they might begin to recognize both its importance and usefulness---this because experience would make the positives associated to with the process more salient to them than what they perceive to be its negatives. This study was designed to examine the validity of this claim.
The proposed study will investigate whether experience with portfolio assessment in teacher evaluation operates to make teachers attitudes of the portfolio assessment process more positive. Specifically, two groups of secondary school teachers, one group that has had ...