Abstract:

The assessment of students’ competences and personal professional qualities is a compulsory component of pedagogical monitoring, and one of its mechanisms is an electronic educational portfolio. Various methods and tools are being developed in this connection.

This research aims at substantiating a method to create an educational electronic portfolio suitable for the assessment of competences and personal professional qualities of students. The most important tasks of the research include improving the existing models of educational electronic portfolios, as well as highlighting and substantiating the levels of its formation.

The research methodology is based on the systemic approach (considering the portfolio as a component of pedagogical monitoring, and monitoring as an informational mechanism to manage the quality of education), the competence-based approach (considering competences as a target for professional training), the probabilistic-statistical approach (considering the assessment of competences as a statistical measurement) and the qualimetric approach (proclaiming the need for multidimensional assessment of competences). The research methods include the scientific literature analysis, methods of set theory, modeling, methods of mathematical statistics, qualimetry methods, and pedagogical experiment.

Having suggested a mathematical model for an electronic educational portfolio, the authors substantiate that such a portfolio should be a mandatory component of monitoring technologies. An innovative mechanism to develop an electronic educational portfolio suitable for a multidimensional assessment of competences (personal and professional qualities) is proposed. Five levels of a student’s educational electronic portfolio are identified, correlating with the degree of the portfolio’s suitability for the automated assessment of competences. The correspondence of the student’s electronic portfolio to these levels is assessed in the course of experimental work with 2948 students who enrolled at an engineering university – Kuban State Technological University (Krasnodar, Russia) – in 2016, 2017, and 2018. The relationship between the level of the students’ electronic portfolios and the level of their information competence is also studied. It is noted that the level of information competence affects the level of the activities for the development of an electronic portfolio, though a high level of information competence does not itself guarantee a high level of a student’s electronic portfolio (due to the strong influence of other factors).

The practical significance of the results of this research is that they can be applied in pedagogical monitoring systems (in the conditions of a university digital educational environment). The theoretical significance of the research results lies in the fact that they are a basis for further scientific understanding of issues related to quality management in higher education.

Keywords:

Electronic Portfolio, Pedagogical Monitoring, Competences, Personal Professional Qualities, Assessment.