The economics of learning: tradeoffs in student teachers’ use of multipurpose digital portfolios

ABSTRACT

Digital portfolios have gained an increasing prominence in teacher education programmes around the world as a consequence of research which purports their multiple benefits to users and of their potential to represent beginning teachers’ practices. Despite the current popularity of digital portfolios, the nature of their use is still not well understood. This article explores how student teachers use digital portfolios in a teacher education programme in Singapore from an economics perspective. It posits that the adoption of an economic lens would shed new light on existing understandings and raise awareness of how and why student teachers use digital portfolios the ways they do. Reference to a range of economic concepts would will help to better understand educational outcomes. The article considers the implications of the findings for informing how digital portfolios are implemented and raises issues for consideration in further implementation efforts and in future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital portfolios
• teacher education
• scarcity
• trade-offs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Office of Education Research, Educational Research Fund [OER06/11 ZMM].

Notes on contributors

Stefanie Chye

Stefanie Chye is an Assistant Dean for Teacher Leadership & Professional Inquiry, at the Office of Teacher Education and an Assistant Professor with the Psychology and Child & Human Development Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests are self-regulated learning, innovative pedagogies, as well as technology-enabled teaching and learning.

Mingming Zhou

Mingming Zhou is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education and Director of the Educational Research Centre at the University of Macau. Her research focuses on technology use for academic purposes, including how students search information online for learning, how e-portfolios facilitate teaching and learning, and how modern technology is utilised in classrooms. She is also dedicated to developing innovative research methods for researching self-regulated learning using technology.

Caroline Koh

Caroline Koh is Head and Associate Professor at the Psychology and Child & Human Development Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research projects include studies in diverse fields such as student motivation, teacher education, the development of moral judgment, pre-service teachers’ perceptions of national education, the effectiveness of simulation-based learning, e-portfolios and the flipped classroom approach.

Woon Chia Liu

Woon Chia Liu is the Dean of Teacher Education at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She is also an Associate Professor with the Psychology and Child & Human Development Academic Group, and a co-founder of the NIE’s Motivation in Educational Research Laboratory. Her research interests include self-concept, motivation, teacher education, innovative pedagogy, e-portfolio and clinical practice.