Using electronic portfolios to measure student achievement and assess curricular integrity

Successful achievement of program outcomes is the primary goal of nursing education programs. Electronic portfolios are a contemporary method by which to measure student achievement, assess curricular efficacy, and evaluate program integrity in nursing education.The authors outline the sequential process of understanding, introducing, and integrating electronic portfolios into a curriculum. Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. —William Butler Yeats Over the past 2 decades, the preva-lence of portfolio use for monitoring and assessing student achievement in K-12 education has increased.1 The impetus for including portfolios in teacher education programs was in-herent in recommendations from sev-eral reports.2-4 Collectively, these re-ports call for improvement in assessment methodology. Included in the recommendations was proposed development of high-quality performance assessments of teachers. Electronic portfolios were among the assessment tools educators employed to address these recom-mendations. As a result, electronic portfolios are now considered digests of evidence representing the critical skills required for professional and ac-creditation standards. Uses of elec-tronic portfolios by institutions and departments include assessment of the integrity of academic programs as well as evaluation of the success of students enrolled in the programs.5 The use of electronic portfolios is relatively new to higher education and to nursing; however, during the past decade school health educators have used the electronic portfolio as a viable method for demonstrating student learning in outcome-based education and preparation. Electronic portfolios also have been used as professional development tools for school health educators to demonstrate teaching ef-fectiveness and professional prepara-tion.6 Use of the portfolios encourages students to “write for a real audience” (6 p. 247) and encourages students to pub-lish their work employing various media formats. Sorrell et al7 implemented portfo-lios as a way to assess students ’ criti-cal thinking abilities across the disci