ABSTRACT
This chapter provides insight into an increasingly popular way to find out, as Jeremy Cohen put it, “What our curriculum and pedagogy is accomplishing,” and “What we can do as professional educators to increase student success” (2004). A dozen years ago it was difficult to identify a media education program that required a student to complete a portfolio that summarized his or her undergraduate work. However, at this writing, a single Yahoo search for “portfolio + mass communication” yielded 60 undergraduate programs that required portfolios for this purpose. (This Yahoo search also discovered a number of graduate and certificate programs that required portfolios as part of the application process. Also, Lebanon Valley College's English Department, in which Media Studies is housed, requires a satisfactory student portfolio as a prerequisite to enrolling in their internship course. As well, this survey also discovered colleges and universities that required portfolio projects (scrapbooks, student reviews, and reflections on their media use) as early on as their Introduction to Mass Media courses.
