Building Knowledge Through Portfolio Learning in Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition

By definition and through practice, distance education has become synonymous with innovative models of program delivery that offer more generous open and flexible learning opportunities to wider and more diverse audiences than did the bricks-and-mortar classroom structures of the past. The commonly accepted ways in which open and distance institutions are perceived to serve diverse student populations center on issues of scheduling and geography, typically allowing easier access to postsecondary education for those who have not previously enjoyed that option. And while the complex relationship between the concepts of diversity, access, and of facilitating adults’ learning through the recognition of their prior learning raises philosophical issues around social and power relationships, the presence of PLAR within postsecondary systems nonetheless provides viable alternative learning opportunities to distance learners.

The recognition of prior learning is practiced globally as a means of honoring and building on mature learners’ past experiential learning. Grounded in ancient philosophies, the recognition of prior learning is defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization as “the formal acknowledgement of skills, knowledge, and competencies that are gained through work experience, informal training, and life experience (Vlãsceanu, Grünberg, & Pârlea, 2004, p. 55). Western educators can find more recent history in the works of Pestalozzi and Dewey, who presented sound pedagogical rationales for recognizing adults’ experiential learning: “The beginning of instruction shall be made with the experience learners already have … this experience and the capacities that have been developed during its course provide the starting point for all further learning” (Dewey, 1938, p. 74).

Dewey’s advocacy of a progressive philosophy that promoted real-world learning echoes through the work of many adult educators. In North America, Moses Coady and Myles Horton were among those whose parallel views were instrumental in bringing educational opportunities to the oppressed and poverty stricken. Farther abroad, Paolo Freire’s work with farm workers in South America rested on the foundational premise of their experiential learning. More recently, in exploring transformational learning across the span of adults’ lives, Welton (1995) cited Mezirow’s understanding of the role of educators in helping learners mine their past for reflexive learning. The educator’s role, Mezirow holds, involved three interrelated activities: (1) helping self and others engage in reflection; (2) helping self and others redefine premises, and (3) helping self and others decide how to act on new insights and understandings (Welton, 1995). In this declaration, Mezirow worked toward giving experiential learning value as an active-learning occasion by implicating the teaching role in the re-creation of learners’ pasts.

Nonformal and informal learning acquired by learners through training, workplace offerings, nonaccredited institutions, or simply from life’s lessons is generally not recognized for transfer by accredited postsecondary institutions. However, it is this type of learning that provides the material for the PLAR process which, in past years, was more commonly known as prior learning assessment (PLA). The addition of the R was designed to emphasize the final outcome of the assessment process through which learners’ experiential learning was recognized—and, in that way, awarded credit toward postsecondary studies (Thomas, 1998).

The commitment to serving learners at a distance involves a great deal more than what is quickly and easily visible. While it may appear that the only difference between open and distance learning institutions such as Athabasca University and traditional universities is that open and distance learning institutions do not have learners sitting in campus classrooms, in fact the entire open and distance institution infrastructure is pitched differently in order to accommodate all the facets of distance education.

Established by the provincial Government of Alberta in Canada in 1970, Athabasca university serves over 34,000 students, its complex infrastructure designed to oblige the many diverse needs of distance learners. It offers blended and flexible delivery models. Its individualized study courses permit self-paced learning and free learners from specified class schedules. Continuous entry offers year-round study opportunities. Anyone over the age of 16 is eligible for admission to the university. Programs are designed to allow learners to maintain full-time careers while studying part-time. Study materials are sophisticated and carefully crafted. All student service transactions can be enacted electronically, and all library holdings can be downloaded onto mobile learning devices. Taken together, these innovations hallmark a progressive distance learning institution.

In its mandate and vision statement, AU outlines its commitment to reducing the barriers to achieving a university education. Following on this, it adopts as a key pillar in its foundation a process of recognizing learners’ prior experiential learning. To implement a coherent and integrated prior learning recognition policy, AU maintains a central office where personnel champion, direct, and manage the PLAR process. The existence of such an internal and integrated structure makes Athabasca University somewhat unique among Canadian universities; the size of its operation places it at the forefront of university prior learning practice in Canada.

Athabasca University’s recognition and accreditation of learners’ prior and experiential learning is firmly rooted in the university’s mission statement that reflects its vision as an open and distance institution. As an open university, it is generous in its allocation of credit for formal transferred learning. AU also maintains a policy that guides applications from non-accredited institutions through a rigorous process of evaluation when such institutions seek laddering partnership agreements to benefit their graduates.

The recognition of informal and non-formal learning, however, is addressed by AU’s PLAR policy, with its focus on the assessment of learning. AU implements PLAR using both challenge-for-credit and portfolio assessment methods, thereby reflecting the field’s general understanding of the twin practices for PLAR implementation, challenge and equivalency (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2001). Under the challenge-for-credit policy, learners may choose to target a specific course for which they feel they already possess the required knowledge or skills. Working with the course professor, they then engage in a contractual relationship to meet the challenge conditions that have been pre-established for the course. While this processes honors their right to bring forward their prior knowledge, learners applying to have their prior knowledge recognized in this fashion are obliged to tailor their learning histories to fit into predetermined knowledge clusters that look like Athabasca University courses. While this is just one model of PLAR—and an acceptable one—it is not a model that gives learners the opportunity to build new knowledge on the foundation of their prior knowledge.

Rather, it is in the process of preparing a portfolio that demonstrates their knowledge through the careful selection, reflection, connection, and projection of learning artifacts that learners can most fully exercise the scope and latitude of their prior knowledge. In so doing, learners’ cognitive engagement with their learning histories gives rise to new knowledge—of self, of self situated within the trajectory of growth, and of self situated within the profession.

While the portfolio approach to PLAR offers learners the possibility of richer, more self-directed learning experiences, two caveats must be stated here: firstly, not all learners avail themselves of the pedagogical possibilities offered by the portfolio method. Secondly, the portfolio approach is necessarily guided by sets of university-provided criteria and outcomes. That said, portfolio criteria and outcomes serve as guidelines and structuring devices rather than as hard-and-fast targets. They provide signposts around which learners can rally and organize their own learning, rather than stipulating for them what they must know in order to be successful in their petition.

In Athabasca University’s PLAR system, as in other postsecondary systems, the portfolio is the vehicle through which learners’ prior learning can be assessed for credit toward a university credential. More broadly, portfolios serve as repositories of achievement and methods of celebrating growth for lifelong learners. Outside of learning venues, portfolios are also used as performance assessment tools for those seeking advancement in the workplace; they also serve as showcase vehicles for those seeking recognition of their accomplishments.

Universally, portfolios are being touted more widely than ever as an essential part of citizenship, personal performance, or learning. To this end, the European Union promotes the development of a personal portfolio for each of its citizens by 2010. Similarly, many postsecondary institutions now include a portfolio as an essential component for graduation from the institution. Such a portfolio would capture the graduand’s entire learning history from the institution, featuring papers, assignments, reflections, triumphs, and struggles, as well as indications of present and future career aspirations. Barrett and Carney (2005) describe the many functions of portfolios in terms of low-stakes and high-stakes assessment. High-stakes assessments reap considerable rewards: learning portfolios that are submitted for university credit are prime examples of high-stakes assessment.

PLAR-by-portfolio generates controversy within the university culture, in part as a result of its existence as a high-stakes assessment tool that offers learners opportunities to sidestep course-taking or fast track through university credentials, even though, in open institutions such as AU, meeting learners’ needs in this way comprises the university mandate. More than that, however, portfolio assessment generates even deeper controversy around issues of power and voice (Harris, 1999; Michelson, 1996). Who controls knowledge, they ask. How can those who step forward with nonuniversity learning be expected to conform to the language of the university so that they can attain fair recognition of their knowledge? Peters (2005) is among many who contest the ability of academic faculty to fairly assess portfolio learning.

It is not hard to find healthy opposition to PLAR processes among university faculty (Wihak, 2006). While PLAR’s more thoughtful opposition cite reasons of social justice and control, there is even greater opposition from those who cite issues that center around finances, credential integrity, and academic standards. Promoting PLAR to these critics depends, at a meaningful pedagogical level, on being able to demonstrate a system that is rigorous, sound, and capable of initiating self-reflection and critical thinking.

To do this, it is necessary to return to PLAR’s first principles in two ways, the first of which is recognizing the value of mature learners’ prior learning. PLAR literature is indebted to Dewey (1938) and Kolb (1984) for their work on experiential learning and its value to individuals and their societies. Of no less importance, however, is the belief in a constructivist-based approach to learning. As Barrett and Carney (2005) state, “A portfolio whose purpose is to foster learning and document growth over time is based upon a constructivist model” (para. 5). In this view, which is also the writers’ view, the portfolio process allows learners to begin at a point of their own choosing and to select and reflect on learning that is important to them. Their learning challenge is to integrate that knowledge into the knowledge asked of them by the institution. Following this view, portfolio development would be analogized as a journey, complete with all the meandering, false starts, corners, surprises, and difficulties that any journey holds.

Following in the narrative tradition, a number of metaphors have been put forth to capture the portfolio’s “power for learning” (Diez, 1994, p. 26). Some examples are portfolio as story, as laboratory, as poetry, as mirror, as map, as celebration, and of course as journey. These metaphoric descriptions of portfolios attempt to capture the constructivist nature of this particular paradigm by emphasizing the notions of reflection, revisitation, restorying, and learners’ ownership of the final product. A more positivist view of the portfolio’s role in learning would understand the portfolio as an instrument or a conduit to accreditation at the educational institution for which it is designed. Using this reasoning, the portfolio would be analogous to a gate or a portal; in other words, the portfolio would serve as a destination. Portfolio-as-portal is not the understanding of portfolio usage that underpins using portfolios as agents of knowledge-building.

Given then, the practice of portfolio-as-journey, learners pass through a number of cognitive stages during portfolio preparation. Somewhat glibly labeled “reflect, select, connect, project,” each of these steps requires intense and laborious thought; each step may spark the “aha” moment that occasions learning.

Among adult learners—and PLAR participants by definition are adult learners—learning is a voluntary action that centres around things already known. From the starting point of applied relevance and personal meaning, adult learners enter into a relationship with their environment to construct new meaning (Angelo, 1993; Mackeracher, 2004). This process is one of thoughtful reflection, resulting in what Crites (1971) has termed a movement from the “mundane” to the “sacred”: learning to understand experience beyond the isolated, secular level. Helping learners to settle at this level of interpreting their experiences is a process intended to elevate their stories beyond the confines of their own immediacy to more generic levels of knowledge. For example, a single mother who wrote about her demanding personal schedule that included shuttling her sons back and forth to hockey practice and assuming multiple parental roles used those experiences to highlight her organizational skills and the resultant value that her inter-collegial skills brought to her workplace. As she worked through the process of reflecting on the lessons emanating from her household tasks, she drew new meaning from those tasks and “learned” that she had actually been honing new skills.

Adults are celebrated for their rich and varied learning histories. When preparing a PLAR portfolio, applicants must mine their past experiences selectively for the events that can most effectively anchor the learning narrative that they are creating. Their selections constitute a type of scaffolding upon which they build the stories of their learning. In putting together this framework, they map both their histories and their futures in a form of strategizing similar to the cognitive processes that would formulate the answer to an essay question asking for a detailed explanation of the events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In this case, however, the value and nature of the knowledge incidents are contained in the fact that they are related to self; selecting them and denoting them as valuable labels them as integral pieces in the exercise of building self-knowledge.

The act of connection occurs both subsequently to and concomitantly with the act of selection. As in the example of the Berlin Wall used above, once the “knowledge items” have been identified, they must be linked or arranged into an order that serves the purpose at hand. While the complex “brain rules for meaningful learning” (Mackeracher, 2004, p. 14) are located in cognitive psychological studies that are outside the purview of this article, as educators we depend on research that tells us that the notion of connection is critical to learning as it both creates and uncovers meaning.

Mackeracher (2004) cites the “basic learning cycle” that incorporates the work of Kolb (1984) and other theorists into five basic phases of learning. In brief, the five phases include: participation in experiences and activities; making sense of experience by giving it meaning or value, using pattern-recognition and other cognitive processes; applying meanings and values to problem-solving and decision-making processes to make choices; implementing action plans; receiving feedback both from others and from self-observation.

The integral theme of connecting experience to meaning recurs in situated cognition theory (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) and also in transformation theory (Mezirow, 1995). Using the same processes that Mezirow outlines for engendering transformational learning by critically reflecting on and modifying current assumptions and understandings, the PLAR process also asks learners to engage in knowledge-building activity.

The last step for PLAR applicants in putting forth the demonstration of their learning is to determine an appropriate presentation method —to project the evidence of their learning in a format deemed acceptable by the receiving institution. In high-stakes assessment processes, there are usually rigorous, policy-mandated guidelines that determine portfolio structures. While the fact of such guidelines lends credence to the criticisms posed by theorists on issues of power and voice, the presence of the guidelines concomitantly seek to assure those within the institution of PLAR’s quality as a learning process. That there is an ongoing tension on these issues is well understood within the field (Andersson & Harris, 2006). Nonetheless, in conforming to a structured set of expectations, learners meet another set of learning outcomes by fulfilling process (or generic) outcomes that might be labeled thus: using and constructing documents accurately; communicating appropriately in text; understanding one’s learning style and adapting it to tasks at hand. The foundational importance of this type of learned skill is reflected in the compilation of national-level outcomes for all learners (Government of Canada, 2006).

The “projection” of PLAR applicants’ learning according to templated guidelines results in the production of a substantial portfolio document. The portfolio format itself is designed to triangulate learners’ demonstration of knowledge and, in constructing such a document, learners are further encouraged to apply their organizing and prioritizing cognitive skills. The entire document should contain most of the following parts: table of contents, resume, narrative autobiography or personal narrative, chronological learning history, educational and career goals, demonstration of learning through learning statements, and documentation of learning. The documentation of learning often forms the bulkiest part of the portfolio as learners include many types of documentation, including letters of attestation written by externals to validate their learning claims, and copies of credentials, awards, certificates, and other artifacts.

The heart of the knowledge construction exercise, in this text-based portfolio method, rests in the process of writing learning statements. Learning statements form the body of the demonstrated evidence of the learning that PLAR applicants claim to have acquired. The documentation described previously must support these claims. Based on Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), which stratifies cognitive achievement into six hierarchical categories— knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation—learners compose statements that appropriately reflect learning outcomes that they feel they have achieved. [Note: The writing of learning statements is indeed the heart of the portfolio. Learning statements reflect the understanding of experience as learning. It is an exercise that challenges learners—often for the first time— to deconstruct their learning and break it into its constituent parts. Learners are provided with tools to assist in this difficult process— guidelines, templates, examples, and instructions. Those responsible for PLAR at Athabasca University provide coaching and mentoring for learners at all stages of portfolio development but most of the assistance is required for the writing of learning statements.] The level of the learning is reflected through their choice of verb, according to the taxonomy. For example, using a verb indicating the acquisition of “knowledge,” such as recite, places the learner’s achievement at the low end of the assessment scale whereas a verb indicating the ability to evaluate, such as assess, places the learner at the high end of the scale.

The process of writing learning statements presents a vigorous cognitive challenge to most learners, and most PLAR applicants struggle with this task. At the end of it, however, with the clarity that arises from successfully resolving a task, their reactions reflect both satisfaction with and wonder at the nature and extent of the learning that they realize has occurred. Of her PLAR experience, Joan wrote:

Similarly, Alva commented:

And, from a PLAR completer who had commented on his portfolio’s usefulness in the job interview process came this summary comment: “It was a lot more work than I had anticipated but I am proud of the finished product.”

The cognitive steps described above are lodged within a larger paradigmatic framework. Institutions promoting PLAR find their greatest success with a system that permits, encourages, and even directs learners toward and through such a layered process. While the framework that follows focuses on Athabasca University’s system as an example, the inspiration is drawn from the literature that shapes PLAR practice.

There is a tendency, among certain PLAR factions, to overcelebrate the self through extensive personal history activity. That said, Harris (1999) spoke of the relationships between personal biographies for self-therapy and of connecting personal experience to social history in meaningful ways. There is no doubt that the autobiographical substance of PLAR is a useful and personally satisfying aspect of a laborious process. The PLAR process must be allowed—and encouraged— however, to transcend the celebration-of-self and become a celebration of learning. It is challenging to find the balance between the two integral functions of the portfolio.

PLAR practitioners at Athabasca University have found that one of the ways to de-emphasize the diarist approach to portfolios is to structure PLAR instruments that foster critical thinking and encourage the connecting of experiential critical incidents to life choices, especially educationally and professionally. AU’s PLAR process has introduced a portfolio component called “framing the issue” wherein applicants are invited to focus critically on how they have come to be where they are—in their lives, in their work, and in their studies. This particular part of the portfolio encourages movement toward Crites’ (1971) “sacred” understanding of higher-level importance. The management-oriented assessors who reviewed the hockey mom’s work were very pleased with the elevation of socioeconomic specifics to a more generic and academically relevant level of understanding.

The need for a responsive mentoring process for PLAR applicants underpins many of the strategies and conditions mentioned above. While the combination of Bloom’s Taxonomy and clearly defined criteria provides appropriate guidelines to PLAR applicants, gaps may exist between applicants’ grasp of their experiential learning and their ability to capture that learning thoughtfully and appropriately. It is critical to provide mentoring opportunities by which learners can receive assistance to bridge those gaps (Arscott, Crowther, Young & Ungarian, 2007). At a distance institution such as AU, all mentoring—of necessity—occurs either over the telephone or by email transaction.

It is important to understand the nature of the portfolio assessment process as the assessors’ work complements and fulfills the learners’ task of demonstrating the knowledge that they claim to have. The assessor must comprehend the portfolio’s role as both process and product in the learners’ knowledge-building journey.

In high-stakes portfolio processes in postsecondary institutions, learners undertake difficult and complex journeys as they mine the breadth and depth of their learning histories to bring forward evidence of appropriate learning. Using Athabasca University as an example—to complete the bird’s-eye view of that institution’s PLAR process—teams of content experts assume responsibility for assessing learners’ knowledge and for determining its relevance to learners’ current programs of study at the University. Assessors are looking for the connections that learners have created between their past experiential learning and its application to current learning. They are looking for the insights, revealed in learners’ narrative writing, that speak to learners’ thoughtful awareness of the importance of their learning in their personal and professional lives. In addition to providing a numerical score that is dependent on learners’ adequate addressing of sets of criteria, assessors are also asked to respond narratively as fully as possible to the learner’s portfolio presentation: what was missing? What strengths are displayed? How can a learner best complete his or her program in order to utilize past learning while at the same time remedying any perceived gaps in required knowledge?

As outlined by policy, assessors are looking for a minimum of a 60% overlay with either broad program outcomes or more specific course outcomes. The criteria that have been developed by each program contain levels of accomplishment for each listed criterion; roughly speaking, the levels of accomplishment mirror Bloom’s Taxonomy. The benchmarks for meeting the stated outcomes reflect primarily the cognitive domain as most university-level learning that is put forward for assessment resides within the cognitive domain rather than in the affective or psychomotor domains.

Assessors triangulate learners’ claims using the other documents within the portfolio that were described earlier. A transcript of past formal learning and documents outlining the learner’s program progress assists assessors in understanding where and how the learner’s learning fits into the program of study.

McLuhan observed that the advent of new technologies often confuses societies. At the very least, the advent of new technologies gives rise to over-the-shoulder reflections on what “was.” In the last 15 years, distance education, especially online learning, has sparked new pedagogical interest in the teaching-learning exchange. Similarly, the arrival of e-portfolio technology has generated new discussion about the place of portfolio learning in education. E-portfolio technology is especially attractive to distance educators because of its fit with the distance mandate. But do e-portfolios have the potential “to alter education at its very core,” as Batson (2002, p. 4) suggests? The answer is no—if the enterprise that hosts the use of e-portfolios adheres to the notion of portfolios as agents of knowledge-building.

There are many types of portfolios. Generally, the rising interest in “portfolios as expression” can be understood as a reflection of society’s fascination with exploration of the self, perhaps one of many trends influenced by a combination, in the Western world, of the babyboomers’ dominance of social facts and the recent emergence of a strongly technological society. Blogs, wikis, chatrooms, even cellphones—each innovative communication device has contributed to our ability, and in turn, our desire, to express ourselves in tangible and public ways.

Personal portfolios, like blogs, provide opportunities for their owners to manifest their aspirations, accomplishments, thoughts, queries and musings to the external world. Personal portfolios are increasingly viewed as necessary tools to capture the essence of self, in much the same way that artists demonstrate their worldview through creative portfolios. Many educational programs ask that their students create a portfolio during their period of study so that the portfolio can serve as a record of accomplishment, a snapshot of that particular experience—a statement of growth, maturity, participation, and citizenship. In some instances, these types of portfolios are initiated by educational institutions with the intention that young learners should continue to keep them current, thus allowing the document to serve as a “portfolio for life.”

Similarly, many workplaces encourage employees to develop a performance portfolio. This type of portfolio highlights employees’ skills and accomplishments and is used as evidence of “promotion worthiness.” Applicants seeking new positions may take along a portfolio to demonstrate their suitability for the job. Immigrants seeking credentialization in their country of choice may depend on a performance portfolio to highlight their accomplishments as they seek entry into their chosen culture through education or the workplace.

The educational, or learning portfolio, that is described in this article

At Athabasca University, as in most postsecondary institutions’ high-stakes assessment portfolio use, material must be assembled for the exact purpose of attaining credit at the institution. A part of AU’s portfolio-building process requires applicants to research their program and the course outcomes that it comprises. From this rigorous structure that is defined by educational requirements comes a very targeted and precise document. Most importantly, AU’s portfolio process first of all encourages reflective learning activity in its participants and, second, demands evidence of that learning.

An electronic portfolio format can provide a home for the same type of thoughtful process in which learners engage as they prepare their paper documents. As Tosh, Light, Fleming, and Haywood (2005) outlined, as with paper-based portfolios, the

There is no doubt that, especially in fields that value computer, technology, multimedia, or design skills, learners’ use of e-portfolios could provide not only a more engaging demonstration of skills but also a more technically correct demonstration of skills. However, Tosh and colleagues’ (2005) contention that e-portfolios offer opportunity for learner control and promote deep learning should be true of any good portfolio process and should be no less true of the traditional paper-based portfolio. Tosh’s assumption, based on the adult education premise that learners engage more successfully when they have control (Ramsden, 2003), skirts the deeper cognitive issues of how learners connect to, or feel ownership of, their learning. Do today’s learners feel more connection to electronic portfolios? As reflected in similar discussions of the merits of print-based journals and e-journals, some will; some won’t.

Ideally, advocates of learning portfolios, whether paper-based or electronic, will strive to support the concept of learners’ “portfolios-as-learning” while adhering to the rigors and accountability of high stakes assessment for the purpose of credit allocation. However, the introduction of another layer of technology brought about by e-portfolio use potentially raises two concerns.

First, e-portfolio technology has the potential to alienate assessors. Universities such as Athabasca University use assessors who tend to be academic faculty who have the time and the inclination to contribute to the PLAR process because they are older faculty members, secure in their positions. Cumbersome as paper-based portfolios often are, some assessors prefer them to the increased computer usage that e-portfolios require.

Second, if as Barrett (2000) suggests, “the e-portfolio draws on two bodies of literature, multimedia development (decide, design, develop, evaluate) and portfolio development (collection, selection, reflection, projection),” will the e-portfolio’s necessary emphasis on software design potentially lessen an assessor’s attention to content? Similarly, will assessors searching for an individual’s “learning story” feel less attuned to the applicant who submits an electronic portfolio? Is there the potential of e-portfolios favoring form over content?

In his guide to living in our communications-rich world, Pink (2005) outlined six aptitudes that he feels will be essential for success, describing them as the abilities that have “always comprised part of what it means to be human” (p. 67). The aptitudes he lists— design, story (not just argument), symphony (not just focus), empathy (not just logic), play, and meaning (not just accumulation)—are the hallmarks of critical, insightful thinking. They are also the skills required to produce a successful learning portfolio. The venue for learners’ demonstration of learning may be paper-based or electronic. Although many factors can affect learners’ choice of venue, the journey of discovery that precedes the product should not differ substantially. Keeping learning and knowledge as foundational tenets of the PLAR process will continue to ensure its recognition as fertile ground for learners’ cognitive and personal growth.