Supporting Self-authorship Development: The Contribution of Preparedness Portfolios

Recent calls for changes to engineering education have resulted in the implementation of various pedagogies (e.g., problem-based learning). These calls have even stemmed the emergence of a variety of new and innovative pedagogies, such as preparedness portfolio. While these pedagogies are a promising first step toward improving engineering education, it is important to find ways to evaluate the effectiveness of these pedagogies in a comprehensive and holistic way. This study employs a specific student development framework, self-authorship, to analyze the effectiveness of a specific pedagogy, creating preparedness portfolios. Self-authorship unites different areas of student development (i.e., intellectual, identity, and relationship) to produce a holistic analysis and also because scholars in higher education consider development toward selfauthorship to be a main mission of higher education. The purpose of the study was two-fold: (1) to determine whether or not (and in what ways) the portfolio experience helps students become self-authoring individuals; and (2) to make some observations about the effectiveness of the self-authorship framework as a means to evaluate pedagogies in general. To address these purposes, we engaged engineering undergraduates in creating preparedness portfolios in which they looked at their future in light of past experiences. Our findings suggest that creating preparedness portfolios does support student development toward self-authorship. In addition, through this work, we have identified some strengths and some limitations of the self-authorship framework as an analytical tool to assess new pedagogies.