Various types of portfolio

A portfolio can demonstrate your development. In addition, you can also use it to present your competences in
particular areas. In education you can utilise a range of products to do this, such as a reflection document, results of
assignments, examples or feedback received from lecturers, fellow students or external supervisors; all are instances of
products you can include in your portfolio.

Three types of portfolio

1. A showcase portfolio contains products that demonstrate how capable the owner is at any given moment.
2. An assessment portfolio contains products that can be used to assess the owner’s competences.
3. A development portfolio shows how the owner (has) developed and therefore demonstrates growth. This type of
portfolio will often also contain products from various stages of the process, stages in which feedback has been
received, and possibly also products from work still in progress.

The Three Levels of the Mind

Learning is everywhere. We can learn mental skills, develop our attitudes and acquire new physical skills as we
perform the activities of our daily living. These domains of learning can be categorized as cognitive domain (knowledge),
psychomotor domain (skills) and affective domain (attitudes). This categorization is best explained by the Taxonomy of
Learning Domains formulated by a group of researchers led by Benjamin Bloom in 1956.

A. Cognitive Domain

The cognitive domain involves the development of our mental skills and the acquisition of knowledge. The six
categories under this domain are:

1. Knowledge: the ability to recall data and/or information.

Example: A child recites the English alphabet.

2. Comprehension: the ability to understand the meaning of what is known.

Example: A teacher explains a theory in his own words.

3. Application: the ability to utilize an abstraction or to use knowledge in a new situation.

Example: A nurse intern applies what she learned in her Psychology class when she talks to patients.

4. Analysis: the ability to differentiate facts and opinions.

Example: A lawyer was able to win over a case after recognizing logical fallacies in the reasoning of the offender.

5. Synthesis: the ability to integrate different elements or concepts in order to form a sound pattern or structure so a new
meaning can be established.
Examples: A therapist combines yoga, biofeedback and support group therapy in creating a care plan for his patient.

6. Evaluation: the ability to come up with judgments about the importance of concepts.
 Examples: A businessman selects the most efficient way of selling products.

B. Affective Domain

The affective domain involves our feelings, emotions and attitudes. This domain is categorized into 5 sub
domains, which include:
1. Receiving Phenomena: the awareness of feelings and emotions as well as the ability to utilize selected attention.
Example: Listening attentively to a friend.

2. Responding to Phenomena: active participation of the learner.

Example: Participating in a group discussion.

3. Valuing: the ability to see the worth of something and express it.
Example: An activist shares his ideas on the increase in salary of laborers.

4. Organization: ability to prioritize a value over another and create a unique value system.
Example: A teenager spends more time in her studies than with her boyfriend.

5. Characterization: the ability to internalize values and let them control the person`s behaviour.
Example: A man marries a woman not for her looks but for what she is.

C. Psychomotor Domain

The psychomotor domain is comprised of utilizing motor skills and coordinating them. The seven categories
under this include:

1. Perception: the ability to apply sensory information to motor activity.

Example: A cook adjusts the heat of stove to achieve the right temperature of the dish.

2. Set: the readiness to act.

Example: An obese person displays motivation in performing planned exercise.

3. Guided Response: the ability to imitate a displayed behavior or to utilize trial and error.
Example: A person follows the manual in operating a machine.

4. Mechanism: the ability to convert learned responses into habitual actions with proficiency and confidence.
Example: A mother was able to cook a delicious meal after practicing how to cook it.

5. Complex Overt Response: the ability to skilfully perform complex patterns of actions.
Example: Typing a report on a computer without looking at the keyboard.

6. Adaptation: the ability to modify learned skills to meet special events.

Example: A designer uses plastic bottles to create a dress.
7. Origination: creating new movement patterns for a specific situation.
Example: A choreographer creates a new dance routine.

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom with collaborators Max Englehart, Edward Furst, Walter Hill, and David Krathwohl
published a framework for categorizing educational goals: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Familiarly known as
Bloom’s Taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their
teaching.

The framework elaborated by Bloom and his collaborators consisted of six major categories: Knowledge,
Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. The categories after Knowledge were presented as
“skills and abilities,” with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and
abilities into practice.

While each category contained subcategories, all lying along a continuum from simple to complex and concrete to
abstract, the taxonomy is popularly remembered according to the six main categories.

The Original Taxonomy (1956)

1. Knowledge “involves the recall of specifics and universals, the recall of methods and processes, or the recall of a
pattern, structure, or setting.”
2. Comprehension “refers to a type of understanding or apprehension such that the individual knows what is being
communicated and can make use of the material or idea being communicated without necessarily relating it to other
material or seeing its fullest implications.”
3. Application refers to the “use of abstractions in particular and concrete situations.”
4. Analysis represents the “breakdown of a communication into its constituent elements or parts such that the relative
hierarchy of ideas is made clear and/or the relations between ideas expressed are made explicit.”
5. Synthesis involves the “putting together of elements and parts so as to form a whole.”
6. Evaluation engenders “judgments about the value of material and methods for given purposes.”

The Revised Taxonomy (2001)

A group of cognitive psychologists, curriculum theorists and instructional researchers, and testing and assessment
specialists published in 2001 a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy with the title A Taxonomy for Teaching, Learning, and
Assessment. This title draws attention away from the somewhat static notion of “educational objectives” (in Bloom’s
original title) and points to a more dynamic conception of classification.

The authors of the revised taxonomy underscore this dynamism, using verbs and gerunds to label their categories
and subcategories (rather than the nouns of the original taxonomy). These “action words” describe the cognitive processes
by which thinkers encounter and work with knowledge:

1. Remember
a. Recognizing
b. Recalling
2. Understand
a. Interpreting
b. Exemplifying
c. Classifying
d. Summarizing
e. Inferring
f. Comparing
g. Explaining
3. Apply
a. Executing
b. Implementing
4. Analyze
a. Differentiating
b. Organizing
c. Attributing
5. Evaluate
a. Checking
b. Critiquing
6. Create
a. Generating
 b. Planning
c. Producing

In the revised taxonomy, knowledge is at the basis of these six cognitive processes, but its authors created a
separate taxonomy of the types of knowledge used in cognition:

1. Factual Knowledge
a. Knowledge of terminology
b. Knowledge of specific details and elements
2. Conceptual Knowledge
a. Knowledge of classifications and categories
b. Knowledge of principles and generalizations
c. Knowledge of theories, models, and structures
3. Procedural Knowledge
a. Knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms
b. Knowledge of subject-specific techniques and methods
c. Knowledge of criteria for determining when to use appropriate procedures
4. Metacognitive Knowledge
a. Strategic Knowledge
b. Knowledge about cognitive tasks, including appropriate contextual and conditional knowledge
5. Self-knowledge

Why Use Bloom’s Taxonomy?

The authors of the revised taxonomy suggest a multi-layered answer to this question, to which the author of this
teaching guide has added some clarifying points:

Objectives (learning goals) are important to establish in a pedagogical interchange so that teachers and students
alike understand the purpose of that interchange.

Organizing objectives helps to clarify objectives for themselves and for students.

Having an organized set of objectives helps teachers to:

1. “plan and deliver appropriate instruction”;

2. “design valid assessment tasks and strategies”;and
3. “ensure that instruction and assessment are aligned with the objectives.”

Krathwohl's Taxnomy of Affective Domain

Krathwohl's affective domain taxonomy is perhaps the best known of any of the affective taxonomies. "The
taxonomy is ordered according to the principle of internalization. Internalization refers to the process whereby a person's
affect toward an object passes from a general awareness level to a point where the affect is 'internalized' and consistently
guides or controls the person's behavior (Seels & Glasgow, 1990, p. 28)."

1. Receiving is being aware of or sensitive to the existence of certain ideas, material, or phenomena and being willing to
tolerate them. Examples include: to differentiate, to accept, to listen (for), to respond to.
2. Responding is committed in some small measure to the ideas, materials, or phenomena involved by actively
responding to them. Examples are: to comply with, to follow, to commend, to volunteer, to spend leisure time in, to
acclaim.
3. Valuing is willing to be perceived by others as valuing certain ideas, materials, or phenomena. Examples include: to
increase measured proficiency in, to relinquish, to subsidize, to support, to debate.
4. Organization is to relate the value to those already held and bring it into a harmonious and internally consistent
philosophy. Examples are: to discuss, to theorize, to formulate, to balance, to examine.
5. Characterization by value or value set is to act consistently in accordance with the values he or she has internalized.
Examples include: to revise, to require, to be rated high in the value, to avoid, to resist, to manage, to resolve.

HOLISTIC RUBRICS

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad
description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labelled with numbers (such as 1 through 4),
letters (such as A through F) or words (such as beginning through Exemplary). What each level is called isn’t what makes
the rubric holistic — it’s the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it’s easy on the teacher — in the short run, anyway. Creating a
holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and
give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn’t provide targeted feedback to students, which means
they’re unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each
level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to
approach the teacher and ask, “Why did you give me a 2?” If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few
minutes breaking down the score. If not, he’ll say something like, “Read the rubric.” Then the student has to guess which
factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea
what she’s doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there’s no time (or need, though that’s hard to imagine) for specific
feedback. You see them in standardized testing — the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When
hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a
holistic rubric comes in handy.
ANALYTIC RUBRICS

An analytic rubric breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and
define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

In this case, you’d give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation,
but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort. To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases
in the rubric, like, “the recipient is crowded during the meal” to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got
the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having
to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing
descriptors of satisfactory work — completing the “3” column in this rubric, for example — is enough of a challenge on
its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a
big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won’t necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table
crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won’t clearly
understand what’s expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you’re willing to put in the time to
really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.
 Mathematician

GEORG CANTOR Set Theory

GEORGE DANTZIG Linear Programming
BERTRAND RUSSEL Principles of
Mathematics,
Logicism
RICHARD Definition of Real
DEDEKIND Nos. And Ring
Theory
GIROLAMO Binomial Coefficient,
CARDANO “Ars Magna”
STEPHEN BALWIN Pinwheel Calculator
BLAISE PASCAL Probability
Outcomes, “Greatest
might have been”
ALEXANDER Decibels
GRAHAMBELL
JOHANNES KEPLER Planetary
Rules/Motion
CARL FRIEDRICH Prince of
GAUSS Mathematics, Added
integers from 1-100
GASPARD MONGE Descriptive and
Differential
Geometry
BONAVENTURA Logarithms in Italy,
CAVALIERI Indivisibles
GREGORIO DE Quadrature of
SAINT Hyperbola
ALBERT GERARD Used of sin, cos, sec
JACOB BERNOULI Law of Large
Numbers, Coined
Integral Calculus
JOOST BURGI Table of Arithmetic
Sequence
JOHN NAPIER Natural Logarithms,
Napier’s Bone
HENRY BRIGGS Logarithms of base
10
ISAAC NEWTON Father of Calculus
GODTFRIED LEIBNIZ Dx and Integral
Symbol
LEONARD EULER Graph Theory
(Blind)
FRANCOIS VIETE Letters as Parameter
in Equation
MARIN MERSENE 2 raised to n-1
GIRARD DESARQUES Non-Greek way
Algebra, Projective
AUGUSTIN CAUCHY Octonion, Analytic
Calculus
PAFNUTY Sampling,
CHEBYSHEV Probability
NIKOLAI Hyperbolic
LOBCHEVSKY AND Geometry
JANUS BOLYAI
EVERISTE GALOIS Abstract Algebra,
Teen Prodigy
JOHANN DIRICHLET Fourier Series
COPERNICUS-Helio PTOLEMY-Geo
BENO GUTENBERG Boundary between
mantle and core
CHARLES FRANCIS Magnitude of
RICHTER Earthquake
ARISTARCHUS OF Ancient Heliocentric
SAMOS