Journal of Education and Psychology

Abstract

The major purpose of this study was to examine the reliability and validity of writing portfolios. The students from ten classes of seven elementary schools in Taiwan participated in this study. Six of the ten classes received writing portfolio assessment and four classes the traditional writing assessment.

This study shows that with well-defined scoring rubrics and proper rater training, an acceptable level of rater consistency and reliability could be achieved. However, the degree of consistency varied among portfolio dimensions and raters. Results obtained from generalizability study showed that the largest proportion of variation was due to person and, in most cases, only a small amount of variation was due to rater. However, a considerable amount of variance was due to person and rater interaction, indicating that the rankings of individual students were different from rater to rater.

In regard to portfolio validity, the degree of content relevance could be increased through defining the portfolio criteria, and then through constructing portfolio tasks and rating rubrics according to the criteria. Although there were significant increases in students’ attitudes towards writing for those in the experimental group, the differences between the experimental group and the control group on both a standardized writing test and attitudes toward writing were not statistically significant after the initial differences had been adjusted. Both students and teachers reported positive effects of writing portfolios on their learning and teaching. The convergent validity of the writing portfolios was generally supported by the moderate correlation between portfolio scores and other writing measures. In addition, the results were also in accordance with the developmental stages of children’s writing ability.

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