I read and reviewed the Master’s paper from Kathleen Pettit titled: Implementing e-portfolios to support formative assessment in early primary education, which was published in 2019. I chose to go more in depth reviewing this paper because it focused on building a website that teachers could refer to when looking for more ways to digitize kindergartener students’ learning, making sure that formative assessment remained at the forefront of the learning journey. Another reason that this paper appealed to me was because it featured primary students as the subject matter, with the goal of empowering the students’ parents by ensuring they had the opportunity to play a role in their child’s learning journey. Petit referred to BC’s Education Plan several times throughout her paper highlighting that it recommends that educators choose how and when their students can be assessed, that students be at the center of their own learning, that there be an increased use of access to technology in educational programs, and that parents be encouraged to be more involved in their child’s learning.
This project was formulated in July of 2019, and was carried out to completion in November of the same year. I thought that was a seriously impressive timeline because of the amount of research, work, and dedication that must have been necessary to get the website launched and ready to reference. Pettit conducted several surveys for parents and for teachers in order to get current feedback before beginning her research that would later inform her design.
The literature review was full of noteworthy resources and very well done. I appreciated that she chose to incorporate a table figure breaking down commonly used terms throughout education, making it convenient for the layman to better understand the context in which the terms are being used (see Table 2 Definitions of Terms Pettit, 2019, p.12.). Some of the terms that were often included were: backwards design, intrinsic motivation, digital immigrants, ePortfolio, screencast, and 21st century skills. Pettit organized her literature review so that it provided content for her project and provided research to support why formative assessment (which happens during the learning rather than at the end) is “the preferred process of evaluation to promote student learning” (Pettit, 2019, p.17.) She also included several counter arguments in her literature by acknowledging how challenging formative assessment can be to implement while also pointing out that some would argue that formative assessment is a process and can’t necessarily be documented. In her conclusion of her literature review she stated that “integrating formative assessment into a program is not a simple process. In fact, it has been described as one of the most powerful and least understood features in instructional design.” (p.19)
It was clear that a lot of thought went into the way the paper was laid out due to the way she broke many of the sections down. To mention a few that were included were:
- The purpose, justification, and context of the project
- Benefits and challenges of implementing formative assessment
- Incorporating mobile devices in the classroom
- Benefits of using kindergarten journals for assessment of writing
- Emergent technologies, procedures and methods in major project development
- Field/beta testing, feedback from educational colleagues
- Website design and development
The paper goes on to explain how the website resource was designed using weebly and why it was broken into the following sections; formative assessment, eportfolios, kindergarten journal writing, mobile devices and parents as partners. The Masters Project work here was substantial. Pettit made sure to note that much of what she learned throughout her OLTD experience was applied during the creation of her website in design alone. She applied her knowledge of Hick’s Law and Fitt’s Law as she made the final touches to her project. She also conducted several surveys using google forms that went out to parents and to colleagues for constructive feedback, and worked on several versions making most of the recommended revisions before it was launched as a completed product.
Something that motivated this project seemed to revolve around BC’s New Curriculum and about BC’s Education Plan that states that “Educators will have more ability to decide how and when each student is assessed. New tools that will be developed to provide greater access, richer information, and more consistency across the province on student progress.” (Pettit, 2019, p. 3). In our district, we call them “points of progress” and I’m fired up about collaborating with primary teachers and creating a space where we can take our teacher created points of progress templates to not only alleviate the time that is spent on assessment, but to get quality points of progress out to parents more often than we are currently able to. I want to create a space where teachers can share what they have been creating together. The ministry recommended that we individually find ways to make up these ‘points of progress’, and while many teachers are optimistic and enthusiastic about moving forward with new plans in education, there needs to be more examples, training, and more context provided with these plans so that teachers don’t feel abandoned, stressed and unclear about how to move forward with assessment.
In conclusion, I feel like this project paper was well organized. It provided readers with the background knowledge needed to understand why the project would be valuable to teachers and parents. It explained the importance of shifting towards a formative assessment model online, and it reaffirmed my idea of wanting to press on, and continue to develop my own CCQ around creating a resource for teachers.
Pettit, Kathleen G. (2019). Implementing e-portfolios to support formative assessment in early primary education
https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/21896/Pettit.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y