Portfolio Assessment Used In English Writing Course In High School

The fundamental aim of school education is to develop the potentials of every student, so that they become independent-minded and socially-aware students equipped with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes which help them to lead a full life and play a positive role in the community. In order to achieve that, school education must equip students with the necessary proficiency and efficiency and its teachers with strong values and attitudes towards leaning. As teachers educators must be able to assess these values and attitudes in our students.The traditional tests are criticized for its harmful backwashes on both learning and teaching, so implementing a sound supplemental classroom assessment method is becoming imperative. With the educational reform, Experimental Project of English Curriculum Assessment for School Education began in China in 2000. The author has been involved in one of the research projects which began in Jiangxi in November in 2003. One branch of the project is Portfolio Assessment. The focus of this paper is on the effectiveness of the use of portfolio assessment in EFL writing projects in senior high school.Among the various alternative and authentic approaches to student evaluation, portfolio assessment has been shown to have considerable potential in terms of its use in the evaluation of higher-order, comprehensive skills. A portfolio is a purposeful and meaningful collection of student work that tells the story of student achievement or growth, and to give a fuller picture of what a learner has achieved. The students' involvement and reflection are the two primary themes that run throughout the whole duration. They are empowered to choosing their interested writing topics, deciding the rubrics, reflecting on their compositions according to the peers' and instructor's comments and presenting their finding to the class. In such situations, the students take the initiative to make decisions about their own writing, gauge their own strengths and weaknesses, and set up the learning goals.The student's perceptions of the portfolio assessment and the influence of the treatment were explored in this study. Questionnaires were administered to 117 students in the senior school, along with interviews and dialogue journals. Correlative analysis revealed that portfolio assessment is an effective method for the EFL writing classroom and it can enhance the students' participation, reflective thinking, self-directed learning, and above all it can leave the students a sense of success, which can hardly be found in traditional types of assessment.