The Vermont Portfolio Assessment Program: Interim Report on Implementation and Impact, 1991-92 School Year

Vermont is the first state to make portfolios the backbone of a statewide assessment system. Daniel Koretz, Brian Stecher, and Edward Deibert, the authors of this CRESST/RAND report, have been evaluating the Vermont portfolio program for almost two years. The researchers found that support for the Vermont portfolio program, despite tremendous demands on teacher time, is widespread. “Perhaps the most telling sign of support for the Vermont portfolio program,” write the authors, “is that [even in the pilot year] the portfolio program had already been extended beyond the grades targeted by the state.” An interesting instructional phenomenon was that over 80% of the surveyed teachers in the Vermont study indicated that they had changed their opinion of students’ mathematical abilities based upon their students’ portfolio work. In many cases, teachers noted that students did not perform as well on the portfolio tasks as on previous classroom work. This finding, supported by other performance assessment research, suggests that portfolios may give teachers another assessment tool that appears to broaden their understanding of student achievement.