A 'Sense of self' through reflective thinking in ePortfolios

ePortfolios are becoming more widely used as flexible storehouses for students to collect evidence of learning and documentation of achievement. Rather than being used for a sole purpose, Higher Education institutions are planning for ePortfolios to be embedded in degree programs. Students manipulate their learning artifacts to demonstrate achievement in different content areas and to develop skills for other arenas, such as work readiness and identity evelopment. Two independent research studies that sought to understand the values and outcomes of ePortfolios in teacher education programs in two Higher Education institutions in Australia shared their results to compare student „voices‟.

The studies confirmed many positive outcomes for using ePortfolios for several purposes in higher education. The researchers found that the student immersion in the creative process and reflective practice of constructing an ePortfolio produced a strong "sense of self‟ with regard to their future or current profession as teachers. ePortfolio development encourages students ‟sense of self‟ through a process of skills-uptake such as organization; collecting and classifying of evidence; utilization of tools; and reflection on and in discipline specific knowledge, learning and tasks; and, higher order thinking such as synthesis and evaluation of learning. This paper proposes a framework based on Ryan and Deci‟s (2000) Self-Determination Theory and Lawrence‟s (2006) Self-Concept to encapsulate the strength of ePortfolio creation on student's thinking about their "ideal self‟ as a practitioner.