They are collections of the individual's work and reflect that individual's effort, progress and achievements. Furthermore, portfolios can be a vehicle for empowering students . The process of establishing a personal literacy portfolio helps the learner in setting goals and reviewing them. They also learn to consider possibilities and to make choices using critical thinking and problem solving skills. Since a portfolio is a collection of material, it can include samples of work gathered on an ongoing basis.
Portfolios also can include examples of literacy tasks outside of class.
Copies of a driver's license, copies of a letter written to a friend or a book read to a child are examples of authentic tasks that could be included in a portfolio. Thus, portfolios can fulfil the requirements of providing a process that collects multi-dimensional data on an ongoing basis. Thus portfolios can provide evaluation data that is authentic and related specifically to instructional and learning goals. Furthermore, if the data provided through a portfolio approach is specifically related to instructional and learning goals, it will be data that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and to determine what has been learned and what still needs to be achieved. Knowing this, instructional decisions can be made and new learning goals can be set.