Implementing webfolios in school leadership internships: "pluses  (Page 4/6)

Results

Upon completion of the internship, students were asked to complete a survey on the use of webfolios adapted from a survey developed by Dr. Helen Barrett at the University Of Alaska Anchorage School Of Education. Data was collected over three internship periods (i.e., 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10) to look for patterns and trends within and across cohorts. The number of interns and the response rate for the survey across the three years of data collection was 74 (87%), 122 (77%) and 99 (85%) respectively.

Reports of usage

The majority of students in the cohorts reported spending an average of 100 hours or less on the development and completion of their webfolios during the internship (61%, 53% and 51% respectively). From a TaskStream report, students typically shared their work 24 times during a 9 month period with the faculty supervisors assigned to support and evaluate their internship experience. This number decreased to 18 times during 2009 and 12 during 2010.

Student reports on the process

Several different survey questions were incorporated in the evaluation process to gather feedback regarding students’ perceptions of the incorporation of the webfolios. Following a five point Likert scale, an average agreement score was computed from the coding of the response categories of primary purpose, very important but not primary, important purpose, less important, not the purpose with values ranging from 1-5 respectively. With lower responses indicating a more primary purpose for the webfolios, the intern cohorts reported the greatest support for the webfolio as serving as a means to develop a reflective school administrator (Table 1).

Students were asked to provide feedback to the question “Now that you are finished, how do you feel about your webfolio?” These narrative responses were analyzed and placed into response categories as presented in Table 2. Students’ narrative responses could be categorized as very positive toward the webfolio usage across all three cohorts.

Regarding the application of the webfolio in actual practice, students were asked to respond to the item “In the future, how do you think you will use or adapt the webfolio?” Narrative responses were analyzed and placed into response categories as presented Table 3. Across all three cohorts, the majority of the students’ responses were categorized as indicating that the webfolio would be used primarily as a reference/resource in seeking a leadership position in the schools.