A portfolio is simply a collection of a student's work. It documents a student's abilities and what she has accomplished during a particular time frame. A reading portfolio, for example, might include a monthly written assessment by the teacher, graded reading tests, vocabulary and phonics work, a list of books the student has read and representative samples of student work.
A concept map creates a visual representation between ideas and words. You can create it by placing a word in a box in the center of a page and then brainstorming and surrounding the word with every idea that relates to the word. Draw arrows to illustrate the nature of the different relationships. A simple example would be to place the word "trees" in the center box with an arrow pointing to "wood" followed by two arrows pointing to "houses" and "furniture." This map indicates trees provide wood that can build houses and make furniture.
To use a concept map as an assessment tool, the teacher creates an expert map of the topic, which should include as many of the relationships as possible. After the lesson or project, students create their own concept maps, which the teacher compares to the expert map. A discussion should follow about any misleading or confusing relationships on the maps.
Checklists are useful for project-based assessments; they can list required behaviors, steps or skills. Teachers can use them when observing student performance and as a method of keeping track of student progress over a period of time. Teachers can create and print checklists targeted to their specific needs at online resources such as Project Based Learning.
Checklists are especially helpful when assessing kindergarten students or to determine school readiness. For example, the Oklahoma State Department of Education has a kindergarten developmental checklist that evaluates social skills, creative skills, language arts, mathematics, motor skills, science and social studies. The advantage of a checklist is it very specific. It assesses such things as "hears and repeats sounds in sequence," "follows simple verbal directions" or "holds and uses pencil using a three-finger grasp."
A rubric is a scoring tool targeted to a specific lesson, assignment or project. It is one of the best tools teachers have for any student work not formally tested, such as performance tasks, group work and projects. For example, in a student diorama project, the rubric might score (using a scale from one to four) the project's appearance, content, images and models, organization, creativity and knowledge demonstrated.
More advanced rubrics might break down the scoring into smaller pieces. For example, the San Diego Unified School District uses a rubric to assess narrative writing that breaks down categories into: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. However, within each of those four areas are additional scores between one and three. Teachers may create their own rubrics, pattern them after colleagues' rubrics or find rubrics from a variety of online and print resources.