February 2005

Perspectives column by Linda Luckey & Beth Warner: What? So What? Now What? Student e-portfolios enhance undergraduate research experiences

Students participating in research experiences at schools such as Purdue and Indiana University have a tool to enhance the development, assessment, and display of their research skills—the digital research portfolio. A digital or e-portfolio is a record of students’ accomplishments during their academic careers and may be used for reflection, communication with instructors, or documentation of credentials. e-Portfolios lend themselves particularly well to documenting and featuring research experiences and can even be used to document their completion for a student’s transcript.

Students who participate in substantial research experiences, like the ones Rachel Thompson and Greg Hanley offer in Applied Behavioral Sciences, could potentially use an e-portfolio to display their work through a web site available to prospective students, potential employers, peers, and graduate schools. In particular, the poster presentation Thompson and Hanley mention could easily be the cornerstone of a student’s e-portfolio page on research.

Learning is an active process through which knowledge is constructed, and reflection is necessary to truly learn from that process. Looking at KU’s first two General Education Goals,

1. Enhance the skills and knowledge needed to research, organize, evaluate, and apply new information, and develop a spirit of critical inquiry and intellectual integrity; and

2. Acquire knowledge in the fine arts, the humanities, and the social, natural, and mathematical sciences and be able to integrate knowledge across disciplines

it is easy to see how an e-portfolio that includes reflection could encourage students to take the research experience beyond simply answering What? to thinking more broadly about So What? and Now What? By integrating the research experience through critical reflection into the entire liberal arts experience, the role of faculty and student is fundamentally changed. The student is no longer simply the recipient of information and the cataloger of skills, but is actively involved in constructing meaning by integrating and reflecting on issues raised in a course or across a program of study. By fostering a reflective approach to learning, the process of e-portfolio development encourages students to become actively involved in planning, and more responsible for achieving, their own educational goals.

Imagine the resource an e-portfolio would be when it represents the best of a student’s work in academic, service-learning, international, and research experiences during his or her university career! Employers and admissions committees could see more than cryptic reflections in a transcript. As an added benefit, e-portfolios could demonstrate the value of undergraduate research beyond our campus. When students’ best work is displayed publicly, potential students, donors, and legislators can easily see the real work of our faculty and students and gain a better understanding of why our enterprise is valuable, not only to students, but to the state and to society as a whole.