Course Portfolios Description and Purpose: Course Portfolios In some respects, a course portfolio resembles a teaching portfolio, with the obvious difference that it is devoted to a single course. More significantly, where a teaching portfolio is usually intended to provide an overview of teaching activity, a course portfolio essentially represents an intensive study of a single course. For instructors who wish to use a single course as a "laboratory" for examining the effectiveness of their teaching, the course portfolio is an excellent vehicle for such efforts. The course portfolio has four main parts: I. The reflective statement The first section is always a reflective statement containing a discussion of the instructor's core beliefs about learning and teaching. This might include what the instructor hopes to teach students and how best that goal can be reached. A chemistry professor, for example, might wish to weigh the relative importance of hands-on laboratory manipulation in conveying certain concepts. Similarly, an instructor in a drama class might want to assess the relative importance of having students perform certain plays as opposed to reading them. II. Documentation A set of detailed entries follows, investigating how effectively the goals of the course have been put into practice. These can include: 1) Student assignments and results, including exams, papers, and other kinds of student work. 2) Information obtained through assessment techniques, including self-assessment by students and student interviews by peer reviewers. It can often be useful to have the detailed entries in this section be oriented around particular kinds of classroom experiences, such as a group research project or discussion of a journal article. In such cases, the entry would offer what the instructor's goals were for that particular aspect of the course, how the goal was implemented, and what the results were. III. Reflections One of the most important sections is the instructor's reflections on what worked and did not work. This might be maintained as an ongoing "course journal." This section might be detailed enough so that at the end of the course it would be possible to go back over the journal and reconstruct the reasoning behind the choices made in teaching the course and creating the portfolio. IV. Appendices The appendices contain copies of work assigned to the students, methods used for obtaining feedback from students, and any forms used for self- assessment. REFERENCES William Cerbin, "The Course Portfolio as a Tool for Continuous Improvement of Teaching and Learning." Journal of Excellence in College Teaching 1994, 5:95-105. John P. Murray, Successful Faculty Development and Evaluation: The Complete Teaching Portfolio. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Number 8 (Washington D.C., 1995).