The Relationship Between Electronic Portfolio Participation and Student Success. Professional File Number 107, Spring 2008

Electronic portfolios (eportfolios) represent an assessment measure with strong potential to provide feedback about student performance to improve curricula and pedagogy, to determine individual students' mastery of learning and support feedback for improvement, and to actively involve students in the assessment process. This study examined the relationship between eportfolio participation and student success. Despite some limitations, the current study demonstrates that, after controlling for background factors, undergraduate students with e-portfolio artifacts had significantly higher grade-point averages, credit hours earned, and retention rates than a matched set of students without eportfolio artifacts. Also, there were significant positive relationships between various measures of e-portfolio utilization and grade-point average and credit hours earned. There were no statistically significant group differences in any of the National Survey of Student Engagement or New Student Transition Questionnaire scales, which served as measures of student academic engagement. (Contains 10 tables.) [The AIR "Professional File" is intended as a presentation of papers which synthesize and interpret issues, operations, and research of interest in the field of institutional research.]