Folio Thinking Project - more details

The Folio Thinking research community is developing reflective portfolio practices and a next generation electronic learning portfolio tool-an E-Folio-to address students' fragmentation of purpose within their education. To this group of researchers "fragmentation of purpose" refers to the lack of coherence in the student experience of higher education. The faculty experiences suggest that many university students are not in the habit of connecting their learning across disciplines, making conscious choices in their learning careers based on their experiences; nor thinking about their learning outside of formal coursework in more informal settings. Supporting students in integrating and synthesizing their discrete learning experiences could enhance their self-understanding and their educational experience and possibly also address an emerging need of contemporary higher education, namely the need to train every student to learn efficiently what needs to be known across domains rather than to become a subject matter expert within one domain. Our society and industry representatives currently emphasize interdisciplinary pursuits in, for example, biotechnology, energy, and environmental systems, that could lead to valuable innovations and solutions to growing national and global problems.

Our Approach

The Folio Thinking research community believes that providing students with the structured opportunity to create a learning portfolio and supporting their reflection on their experiences could enable students to create a coherent and personally meaningful learning career-across their higher education and beyond-and to do so consciously and continuously. These structured learning opportunities could also cultivate a mindset and skills that could enhance interdisciplinary thinking and work. Portfolios and reflection intuitively seem to be powerful tools filled with potential for addressing these issues. A learning portfolio is a purposeful collection of artifacts that represent multiple learning experiences of the portfolio owner, and reflection is the process of thinking about a thing or a group of things from new perspectives in order to understand those things more deeply. Moreover, reflection is often a required component of learning portfolios.

Typically, implementations of learning portfolios focus on the assessment of the body of student work contained in the portfolio because a portfolio offers a richer picture of student progress and achievement than test grades or transcripts. In our novel approach toward learning portfolios, we focus our attention on the learning opportunities and formative assessment opportunities that emerge during the process of creating a learning portfolio. Folio Thinking is the practice that purposefully makes use of learning portfolio activities and reflective thinking techniques to help students accomplish learning objectives.

The Product