Ask Helen Barrett of the University of Alaska College of Education how students feel about creating learning portfolios, and she'll tell you a story about a group of high school seniors in the Pacific Northwest who got together on graduation night and built a bonfire. After four years of chronicling their high school experience, the graduates met up not to celebrate their achievements, but to watch their work go up in smoke.

For years, hundreds of high schools across the country have required exiting seniors to keep academic portfolios of everything from their resume to their favorite assignments and samples of their coursework. And for years, students have resisted, viewing the assignment as just another in a long line of requirements standing between them and graduation.

But thanks to digital technologies and the internet, proponents of the portfolio as a pedagogical movement--including Barrett, who has spent more than a decade studying and promoting the use of electronic portfolios in schools--believe both students and teachers are warming up to the idea.

Barrett says digital portfolios free students from the constraints of paper-based collections, enabling learners to more easily customize their portfolios, incorporate the use of video, save their work to a compact disc and take it with them. Digital portfolios appeal more to today's tech-savvy students than paper-based binders, she contends, and can grow with students as they progress through school and on to full-time employment.

Several states, such as Kentucky and Washington, have rolled out ePortfolio projects for higher education. And at least one other state, Minnesota, has launched a more widespread initiative that provides access to ePortfolios throughout the larger community--from K-12 schools, to colleges, to residents or employees of state agencies.

One of the largest such initiatives of its kind in the country, eFolio Minnesota now boasts a collection of more than 26,000 different ePortfolios--at least 18,000 of which are maintained by students, project administrators told eSchool News.

Unfortunately, Barrett said, although much research exists to support the usefulness of ePortfolios in higher education, there is little scientific evidence of their effectiveness at the K-12 level, where talk of standardized tests and increased accountability have dominated the conversation under President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).

Hoping to change all that, Barrett hooked up last month with TaskStream, a maker of electronic portfolio solutions for schools, to launch a large-scale research project that will explore the impact of ePortfolios on student learning, motivation, and overall engagement in K-12 schools.

Called REFLECT, which stands for "Researching Electronic portFolios: Learning, Engagement, and Collaboration through Technology," the massive endeavor is designed to examine the use of electronic portfolios in secondary education, as well as to enhance TaskStream's student portfolio system--predominantly used in colleges and universities--to meet the needs of high schools.