Chapter 4: Too New a Tale to Tell?: Issues in Evaluating E-Portfolio Systems and Implementations

RMC Research Corporation serves as external evaluator for a wide range of education clients, including the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) and several State and Local Educational Agencies (SEAs and LEAs). After RMC completed a national evaluation of the Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (PT3) grant program in 2002, I managed and staffed external evaluation research programs for several PT3 grantees over the following years 2002–2005, involving dozens of teacher preparation institutions. The three PT3 grant projects selected for discussion in this chapter all used e-portfolios as a core component of their strategies for supporting teacher fluency with technology. As the work of evaluation was in no way a solitary effort, throughout this chapter I use “we” to refer to the the teams at RMC Research Corporation who work to better understand many innovative applications of technology in education settings, e-portfolios among them.