Interdisciplinary Digital Portfolio Assessment: Creating Tools for Teacher Education

Teacher education programs are experiencing reform movements in both performance based assessment and in the integration of technology into the curriculum. Performance assessment entails movement away from traditional curricula and assessment means to achieve more authentic, "real world" ways of verifying the preparedness of education graduates. Our institution’s response to these reform efforts is centered on the newly adopted requirement of a digital portfolio for all preservice teachers. Digital portfolios by preservice teacher education majors have brought a new challenge in the assessment of digital products for institutions of teacher education nationwide. This challenge is magnified when preservice teachers are studying in various areas of licensure, many of which are traditionally housed in various colleges throughout a university. To provide assessment coherency across disciplines, a group of faculty members representing almost all content or teacher licensure areas in teacher education was formed to begin the process of shaping the digital portfolio assessment rubric. The evolution of the processes and outcomes encountered is shared.