A check-up on the Kentucky-mandated Porfolios

In November 2000, researchers Qaisar Sultana and Lisa Key of Eastern Kentucky University presented a paper to the Midsouth Education Research Association. The title was, "Pre-and Post KERA Students' Writing Skills - A Comparative Study." In short, a writing prompt from 1989 was repeated in 1997 to allow for a comparison of student writing. 50 essays from each year were randomly selected and read by 2 graders. The results: "no significant difference was found at any level between the means of the two groups" (3). The researchers interpreted this to mean that while the post-KERA students had produced a lot of writing for their portfolios, and with "...access to the spell check, grammar check, thesauraus, etc. {...} in the classroom or home environment ... [and with] unlimited help from their peers, parents and teachers" (7), they have become dependent on technology and "have not really learned to write (8).

This is helpful to our discussion about portfolios because it seems that we are looking at two different things: students' attitude toward writing vs. learning to write well (or should I say, in a timely, organized fashion). The portfolio system may not be "valid" (ew! that word!) for the persisitent objectivist testing environment.