The advantages of Portfolio-based assessment

- Promoting creativity and problem solving - Assessing attitudes and professional and personal development.

2. The disadvantages of portfolio-based assessment

However, there are also some findings which mention and reveal the disadvantages of implementing such assessment in teaching and learning process. Margery .H,2005 reveals the disadvantages of portfolios as a method of learning and assessment. They are all mentioned below: - When portfolios are used for summative assessment, students may be reluctant to reveal weaknesses. - Portfolios are personal documents and ethical issues of privacy and confidentiality may arise when they are used for assessment. - Difficulties may arise in verifying whether the material submitted is the candidate’s own work. - Portfolios take a long time to complete and assess. - The portfolio process involves a large amount of paperwork. The findings above shows that when portfolio-based assessment is implemented to assess the students’ performance and achievement in their learning, it has both side which are the advantages and disadvantages. In the case of portfolio-based assessment, there are other findings which show its effectiveness on improving students’ reading ability. One study of private English Language Institution students in Rasht by Charvade, Jahandar. Khodabandehlou. 2012 showed that portfolio assessment has a positive effect on EFL learners reading comprehension ability. The findings of this study are in agreement with the existing studies in the literature which revealed that portfolio assessment methods could enhance students achievements. It is also in line with the findings of all the studies showing 7 the usefulness of involving students in the process of their own assessment as well as providing feedback in instruction . Also, another finding done by Calfee and Perfumo 1993 stressed that the use of portfolio-based assessment is important for the teacher to show the learners’ ability and competence, rather than only choosing the correct answers that the learners usually do when they are doing test and especially portfolio assessment provides more information about the learners, rather than just doing mechanical grading. Moreover, it follows that portfolio adjusts the students to produce various types of more authentic works and insist them to be more creative. Besides, portfolio assessment gives the learners more freedom and helps them develop and improve higher order thinking skills and meta-cognitive strategies. It follows that the portfolio assessment in language teaching is a device used to assess various language samples that the learner compiles”. Shohamy and Walton 1992: p.14. One study about the students’ perceptions toward the implementation of portfolio- based assessment by Mustafa 2010, finds other results. The results of the survey confirm that the participants of this study generally have positive attitudes towards portfolio assessment. For instance, in terms of understanding the portfolio process, more than half of the subjects 56.4 state that they know how and why to compile a portfolio in their courses. Additionally, 40.8 of the subjects assert that portfolio sharing activities were beneficial to their understanding of portfolio preparation process. Such activities contribute to their understanding of portfolio preparation process, whereas, 23.5 of them state that such activities do not contribute to their understanding of portfolio preparation process. In terms of students’ beliefs on and reactions to actual practice in preparing portfolio, only 38.9 of them find portfolio’s actual practice as an unsuccessful teaching and evaluation procedure. The writer hoped that by finishing this study, the result of this study could be used as a consideration for the teacherslecturers before they come to decide what assessment they 8