Cultivating a Composing Process: Growing Critical Thinking and Student Success with ePortfolios

Awarded Grant: $19,500

Principal Investigator:

Dr. Timothy W. Gerken, Morrisville State College

Electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) are well established learning tools that correlate well with student success. With this project, we plan to introduce them at Morrisville State College, targeting two specific areas that reflect barriers to student success within our population – writing skills capacity and development across courses and semesters, and engagement with the writing process within first-year composition courses as it relates to retention. We want to expand the use of ePortfolios to emphasize targeted student success related to composition. We will show how ePortfolios can be used creatively to develop active, integrative learning across our curriculum and over time, through the development of an ePortfolio-based interface enabling students and faculty to trace an individual’s writing strengths, struggles, strategies, & goals. We will also trace the effectiveness of ePortfolios correlated with student success and retention within first-year composition courses.

Co-PI’s and Key Partners:

Wyatt Galusky, PhD, Associate Professor, Humanities; Coordinator, Science, Technology, & Society Program, Morrisville State College
Aron Efimenko, Assistant Professor, Humanities, Morrisville State College
Matt Barber, Network and Systems Manager, Morrisville State College

Reports and Resources:

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