E-Portfolio

Intellectual/Professional Growth: E-Portfolio and Levels of Thinking

The Ed.D. program seeks to attract learners who demonstrate clear potential to be effective, thoughtful, and ethical scholar-practitioners in the field of education and who, through the course of their studies, exhibit continuing intellectual and professional growth.

Beginning with the application for admission, learners complete four reflective essays that are submitted and maintained in the electronic portfolio (e-portfolio). The purpose of these essays is to provide an additional basis for assessing intellectual, professional, and scholarly growth. In the essays, learners will discuss and, as appropriate, explain ideas and information gained from their seminar readings and discussions; yet, the primary purpose of the e-portfolio essays is for the learners to reflect on what they have learned and to demonstrate how their thinking has changed as a result of their academic studies.

As such, the e-portfolio essays, when considered together, provide a series of closely related learning activities where the development of learners’ thinking in relation to Bloom’s taxonomy is stored and can be assessed, in the e-portfolio, as a developmental learning tool.

The electronic portfolio is a means for the Ed.D. program to effectively maintain quality and serves as a platform for assessing learning outcomes at four specific points in the program:

• Admissions (Portfolio I)
• Term I, Year One, Term I (Portfolio II)
• Term III, Year Two (Portfolio III)
• Term VI, Year Three (Portfolio IV)

The portfolio of reflective essays is expected to explain/document how the learner is meeting learning objectives and how the learner is progressing over time. It will incorporate diverse content that demonstrates breadth and depth of learning, as well as indicate growth on Bloom’s Taxonomy. At their initial academic residency, learners will learn to digitize the essay they used as part of the application process. As noted above, following the first assessment (at admissions) and completion of the learner’s first academic residency, there will be three additional formal faculty assessments of the portfolio, used to determine:

These assessments will also serve as exit points if, in the opinion of the faculty reviewers, the learner should not be permitted to continue in the program

• the learner’s current level of competence;
• growth and development since the previous review; and
• evaluation of satisfactory progress toward meeting program goals.