College students' participation in E-portfolio learning in relation to academic ability and motivation

E-portfolio has been implemented for students to take responsibility for their studies and to chart student progress but little research has been done on the effectiveness of e-portfolio learning of college students in Hong Kong in relation to their academic ability and motivation. For a group of 84 university students, an electronic-learning portfolio system (e-portfolio) was developed to consolidate learning and guide students to develop specific language skills as they only had two hours of classroom teaching once every two weeks in a professional English language course. To encourage participation, bonus marks were given to students for eportfolio tasks completed, formative feedback was also given and self-evaluation was fostered by the system. The research aims to find out the impact of e-portfolio on students' academic performance, their learning styles and motivation. It is found that the e-portfolio tasks have no correlation with students' academic performance, the students show rather homogeneous learning styles, and self-determination for improvement can drive the students to do a few e-portfolio tasks voluntarily. © Centre for Language Studies