Writing Portfolios at the Elementary Level: A Study of Methods for Writing Assessment

In this paper we report an investigation of portfolio assessment as a method of evaluating elementary students’ competence in writing. Our study contained two components: (a) an empirical study of the utility and meaningfulness of using a holistic/analytic rubric (developed for evaluation of traditional writing samples) to score students’ portfolios; and (b) a qualitative
analysis of scoring approaches, drawing particularly on raters’ critiques of the analytic scoring approach. The analytic rubric used was a well motivated and well researched method for writing evaluation and as such offered a solid basis for exploring the scorability of portfolios and for generating possible revisions or additions to the rubric.