Writing in and across Disciplines
USING PORTFOLIOS AS TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT TOOLS IN A TECHNICAL WRITING COURSE: A CASE STUDY
Tsaona (Seitsiwe) Mokgwathi
Botswana International University of Science and Technology, Palapye, Botswana
This paper discusses the merits and demerits of using a portfolio to teach and assess the technical writing course offered to engineering students at a technical university in Botswana. For a long time, a misconception was abound that portfolio creation is only relevant to practical courses, and cannot be used in the teaching and learning of a nonpractical course such as Technical Writing. However, lecturers of this skillbased course at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology have embraced portfolio creation to coach and assess the writing skills of engineering students because through it, students demonstrate their writing capabilities through practical tasks they undertake during tutorials and outside the classroom. The conceptual framework of this study was derived from the co constructivist approach by Klenowski, Askew and Carnell (2006). The study involved 160 second year students enrolled for various engineering programmes. The qualitative research method was used to analyze the content of portfolios produced by the students in groups consisting of 56 students per group. The results showed that portfolio creation gave students an opportunity to showcase what they have learnt in the course, and that it was also an appropriate assessment tool of their writing. However, the setback was that since portfolios were produced as group work, students’ individual capabilities were not revealed. It is recommended that portfolio creation should become an integral part of assessing students’ performance in technical writing.