The effects of portfolio assessment on reading listening and writting skills of secondary school prep class students

Portfolio assessment has been in use at various levels of education and foreign language teaching is one of them. This study aimed to find out the effects of portfolio assessment on reading, listening and writing skills of students who enrolled in a secondary school language preparatory class and to analyze the opinions of those students on portfolio assessment. The study was implemented on randomly selected two groups, treatment (n=22) and control (n=22), from secondary school English preparatory classes where the ages of students were 15 and 16. Traditional course program was administered in the control group, whereas portfolio assessment activities were integrated into the program in the treatment group. The findings showed that portfolio assessment had significant influence on students' writing skills; however, same results were not found for the reading and listening skills. Also, the analysis of students' answers to the open-ended questions showed that portfolio assessment is a fair method; compared to traditional applications of assessment, it is a more down-to-earth approach; it increases responsibility of students and motivates them. Students' answers also revealed some negative results, such as portfolio studies take time and self-evaluating, reviewing and correcting students' works is a difficult task.