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During the last decade, campuses designing electronic portfolios have used them both in auricular and assessment contexts. And in many campus e-portfolio projects, diverse stakeholders - faculty, staff, students, potential employers, and members of the public - have participated in the design and review of e-portfolios. Such electronic portfolios have included a range of exhibits, from multimedia artifacts and reflective commentary to artifacts-as-evidence linking to institutionally sanctioned programmatic outcomes and to more personalized self-identified outcomes. In sum, these e-portfolios have provided a new, continuing mechanism both for documenting specific practices and student accomplishments and the effects of that these activities have on learning outcomes.
WHAT WE KNOW
At the heart of this work in electronic portfolios is what was first a hope and then an assumption, and now a research-based claim: that creating, evidencing, connecting, and reflecting involved in electronic portfolios engage students in new and beneficial ways - especially when the portfolio provides a space for studentinformed participation
The literature on e-portfolios suggests that student engagement is a critical element of portfolio development (Barrett 2000; Batson 2002; Yancey 2001). The inability to get students engaged or excited about their e-portfolios will result in a flawed implementation. From the students' perspective the ability to personalize their e-portfolio contributes to their motivation to "work" on it throughout the year as well as their engagement in the process (Ring, Weaver, and Jones 2008).
In other words, when the e-portfolio is designed by the student as much as by the institution, implementation efforts are more likely to succeed. As important, where programs are successful in motivating students to be engaged at this level, they see higher rates on key educational metrics when comparing students creating e-portfolios with students who have not done so. Such metrics include higher rates of student engagement on a local measure of engagement (Kirkpatrick et al 2009) as well as on the nationally normed Community College Survey of Student Engagement; higher rates of course completion; and higher rates of retention (Eynon 2009). In these terms, e-portfolios work to increase student engagement.
More recent research conducted at Seton Hall University has focused on the ability of e-portfolios to foster the development of noncognitive traits as well, a topic of increasing interest in higher education. Typically...