Lecturers’ Perspectives on the Effectiveness of Portfolio Assessment for a Professional Development Course

The paper investigated the effectiveness of portfolio assessment for a professional development course in an institution of higher learning. Framed in the interpretive framework, this research began by situating professional development course in the professional development paradigms. Using a qualitative survey design, this paper infers the effectiveness of portfolios from narratives of participants who commented on their usefulness as an assessment tool for professional development. Sixteen participants of the Assessment and Moderation course across Faculties, departments, and disciplines of an institution of Higher Learning highlighted its usefulness. When narratives were analysed, emerging themes and their resultant categories suggested their effectiveness in a number of areas in fostering a process approach to learning; including improvement in and further development of assessment practices. The study recommends the scaling up of portfolio assessment to include other professional development courses, as well as the training of lecturers on portfolio assessment. Address for correspondence: Dr Vuyisile Nkonki Private Bag X1314, Alice, 5700, South Africa Telephone: 0406022704/0724437755 E-mail: vnkonki@ufh.ac. za INTRODUCTION Professional Development Professional development focuses on the effectiveness of one’s professional practice, as well as on substantive problems of one’s practice (Hoyle and John 1995). It seeks to appropriate and disseminate innovative ideas and practices, whilst at the same time aiming at the mitigation of the challenges of one’s practices. Further, professional development involves activities aimed at keeping practitioners abreast of the developments in their fields of practice. In higher education, and for lecturers in particular, professional development encompasses a full range of activities that are formal and informal, engaging lecturers in new learning about their professional practices (Mayer and Llyod 2011). These authors further assert that professional development should be built into the day-today work of teaching, and that it should provide opportunities to gain an understanding of the theory underlying one’s own practices. The effectiveness of professional development depends on the interaction and confluence of teacher knowledge and beliefs, and the use thereof, to improve the content and the pedagogy of their instruction. Desimone et al. (2013) posits that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, classroom practices, and students’ outcomes explain and interact to influence the effects of professional development. This view of professional development, therefore, is concerned with how the activities undertaken by lecturers bear on students’ learning outcomes. In the same vein, Guskey (2002) argues that improvement in the learning outcomes of students is what motivates teachers to change their classroom practices, as well as their attitudes and beliefs. Professional development, according to Winch (2013), culminates at the achievement of occupational capacity which encompasses professional know-how. This professional know-how comes about through the acquisition of systematic knowledge, which when updated, keeps the practitioner abreast of the developments in one’s practice. This capacity is also manifested in the appreciation of the standards of excellence that apply in the rendition of services, and the manner in which these standards are understood by the recipients of the service. The above-mentioned professional development activities, and others, are classified by Kesson and Henderson (2010) into three paradigms, namely (1) the standardised management paradigm, (2) the constructivist best practice paradigm, and (3) the transformative paradigm. The focus of the standardised management paradigm in professional development is to assist practitioners to comply with scripted and pre-