Supporting Individual Folio Learning: Folio Thinking in Practice

1. Supporting Individual Folio Learning: Folio Thinking in Practice Helen L. Chen, Ph.D. Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning NLII Annual Meeting, January 27, 2004

2. E-Folios in SCIL • Informed by 2 projects: • Learning Careers • Folio Thinking • The outcomes from our research have focused on the pedagogical implications and issues relating to the implementation of e-portfolios: • From the perspective of the student or learner • Emphasizing techniques and best practices to support reflective learning

3. The Problem Students’ intellectual experience of higher education is fragmented due to: • Lack of curricular coherence • Increasing demands of an information-rich environment • Growing importance of out-of-class learning experiences

4. Our Approach Provide structured opportunities to: • create learning portfolios • reflect on learning experiences Enable students to: • integrate and synthesize learning • enhance their self-understanding • make deliberate choices in their learning career • develop an intellectual identity

5. Folio Thinking • The reflective practice of creating learning portfolios for the purpose of creating coherence and making meaning • Draws on: • experiential learning • metacognition • reflective thinking • critical thinking • mastery orientation to learning

6. What does Folio Thinking look like in practice? • Extend Folio Thinking to a more specific context and application • 2 research projects currently underway in Mechanical Engineering design • RQ: How can we refine and tailor Folio Thinking practices and techniques so that it is appropriate for design engineering?

7. Applying Folio Thinking to Design Engineering • ME 013N: Designing the Human Experience: introductory freshman seminar • ME 310: PBL-X: Team-Based Design Development with Corporate Partners • Both courses: • Project-based with real clients • Team-oriented • Real subject of the course: design process, design thinking

8. Study Objectives To explore the impact of Folio Thinking on a student’s level of self-confidence in her ability to be an engineer by: • Increasing student self-awareness of knowledge & skills • Helping the student make explicit connections among aptitudes, knowledge, skills, & the real work of engineering

9. Blogs within a Tiki-Wiki Environment • Informal, continuous, easy and low barriers to posting • Students already potentially familiar with blogs • Ability to link reflection to artifacts • Individual commenting/feedback from coaches and others at a distance

10. Implications & Issues

11. Next Steps • Examples and stories of Folio Thinking in practice – What does Folio Thinking look like? • Collecting and sharing of assessment tools, instruments, techniques, best practices for evaluating Folio Thinking