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| Overview | News | Resources | Portfolio |
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| Overview | News | Resources | Portfolio |
A portfolio is a collection of examples of your work, produced to demonstrate your abilities. In this case, you are producing your portfolio for assessment, but in many of the creative professions (e.g. art, advertising, photography, film, website design) you would be expected to have a portfolio to show potential clients or employers what you can do.
Almost anything! A professional portfolio would naturally consist of examples that demonstrate your full range of abilities: for example, a photographer's portfolio might consist only of portraits (if that is his or her speciality) or might include a range of subjects (landscapes, people, animals, architectural details); a pop video director's showreel might include a moody ballad, a hip-hop dance track and a rock anthem; a website designer might showcase web pages built for a university department, a high-tech start-up and an online fashion retailer. In the case of PHY394, the contents of your portfolio will generally fall into one of four categories:
We would normally expect your portfolio to include elements from each of these categories, since they are all important in assessing how well you have engaged with the material (even the process elements are significant, because they demonstrate your skills in planning and organisation).
The contents of your portfolio are mostly decided by you, but because of the structure of the module—in particular, because the second semester is a 10-credit project—a few items are required:
The reflective element is required because it provides evidence that you are thinking about the learning process and your response to it. This is an essential part of your development as a teacher or communicator: you have to be able to understand your audience's likely response, and the best way to develop your ability to do that is to critically examine your own responses.
The semester 1 deliverable is required to ensure that we have evidence of your ability to produce material for public consumption, which is one of the key aims of the module. (We cannot rely on the project deliverable to demonstrate this, because some projects may not involve a deliverable.)
Your semester 1 portfolio must cover at least two of the main themes of semester 1. We expect that most students will cover all the main themes and produce portfolios containing much more than the bare minimum.
PHY394 is basically about communication, teaching and learning. Communication is closely related to the performing arts, and professional communicators—journalists, TV presenters and the like—are among those who would be expected to have a professional portfolio showcasing their work. The deliverables in your PHY394 portfolio can form the initial nucleus of such a portfolio. Likewise, if you are considering a career as a teacher, education-related deliverables (lesson plans, learning resources and so forth) will be useful in job interviews or applications, and the reflective pieces will help you to develop an understanding of the learning process.
From the point of view of assessment, a key advantage of portfolios is that they are flexible. Different students will engage with PHY394 in different ways: those committed to a career in teaching will probably focus on the classroom-based elements, while those with a more general interest in science communication might be much more interested in aspects such as video production and writing for the media. Portfolio assessment allows students to emphasise the aspects of the material that resonate with their interests, while still testing a range of different skills. A case in point is the second semester project. Many education/outreach projects involve the production of a deliverable, such as a YouTube video, a school presentation or a resource for teachers. The standard assessment protocol for projects (25% supervisor's assessment, 50% report, 25% oral exam) provides little room for explicitly assessing the quality of the product: a student who produces a good report, well defended in the oral exam, will get a good mark even if the actual deliverable was mediocre, and conversely a poor report and a nervous viva might result in a poor mark even though the deliverable was superb. With portfolio assessment, we can modify the distribution of marks so that the quality of the product is explicitly taken into account.
Constructing a portfolio also requires you to display skills of organisation and time management. We do not impose deadlines for each piece of assessed work, only for the portfolio as a whole. It is up to you to ensure that your portfolio grows at a steady rate (you really don't want to be trying to construct your entire portfolio in week 12 of semester 2) and that its contents are a good representation of what you have achieved. Skills of this type are a key outcome of project work, and they are effectively tested by the need to assemble a portfolio.
This will depend on what you want to include. A PHY394 portfolio could be entirely electronic (consisting perhaps of a project report, a video, a website, an electronic project log, an electronic video storyboard and a series of short reflective essays), (almost) entirely physical (the project report would have to be submitted electronically for Turnitin, but the project log could be a traditional book, the reflective element might be a traditional diary, and the deliverables might be a mixture of events—such as classroom presentations—and physical objects) or, perhaps most likely, a mixture of the two. The principal constraints are:
The electronic parts of your portfolio should be assembled on the module MOLE site, so that we have access to them if you want feedback or if you run into problems, but the final version should be submitted on a USB stick, so that we have a permanent copy for our records. More details on this will be provided later.
Yes. You will be assessed on the contents of your portfolio as you submit it in week 12 of semester 2. Up to that point, you can add, delete or modify items as you see fit. However, we would advise against removing items altogether, unless you have replaced them with something else—generally speaking, the more items you have in your portfolio, the better.
Reflective writing focuses on your response to an experience (including your response to reading, watching or listening to something). Writing a reflective piece encourages you to think about the experience and what you have learned or should learn from it. For example, suppose that as part of PHY394 you make a presentation to a class of primary school children. A reflective piece based on this experience might consider questions such as:
Reflective writing can take a number of forms. For your PHY394 portfolio we will accept a journal or diary, a series of short pieces, or a longer essay, provided that the total is at least 2000 words. There is more discussion on reflective writing in this article from Andy Gillett's Using English for Academic Purposes.
A deliverable is a finished product intended for public consumption. Generally speaking, a report is not a deliverable: reports are generally intended for your superiors, not for publication. (There are occasions when the report is the deliverable, e.g. public inquiries, but these are not likely to be relevant to PHY394.) Projects, whether in PHY394 or in the real world, will often generate both a report and a deliverable: the deliverable is the product for public consumption, whereas the report is the account of the process by which the deliverable was produced.
Notice that the deliverable and the report are complementary: they do not really overlap at all. The deliverable is the thing that you would unleash on the GCSE cohort: the report would go to your boss (in the real world, probably a publisher or an examination provider such as Edexcel).
As this is a new module, we have no experience to go on, so the mark scheme is likely to be fairly flexible. The basic structure is as follows:
A minimal portfolio consists of the project report and deliverable (if there is one), the project log, and three pieces from semester 1 which must include at least one reflective piece and at least one deliverable and must cover at least two of the main themes of semester 1. For such a portfolio, each of the three semester 1 items is worth 12.5%, and they must all be of at least Pass standard to demonstrate that you have engaged fully with the material.
However, we would expect that most people will produce substantially more than a minimal portfolio, as it is not that difficult to generate additional items (e.g. report plans, journal club reviews, responses to feedback). In this case the mark scheme is more flexible, and you can still get a good mark even if one or two items are below standard.
All portfolios will be independently double-marked. The assessment criteria are:
Not all criteria are applicable to all items, as noted above, but overall the portfolio should demonstrate all these qualities.