Application of Portfolio in Nursing Education and Assessment of Learning

Portfolio is one of the active learning strategies for clinical education. By making portfolio, students present their own projects including clinical learning activities at or near the end of a clinical course. The purpose of this study was to investigate the application of this tool in nursing education in order to know the advantage and limitation of the tool. This study reviews the literature published in Farsi and English with the possibility of accessing the full text of the article over the past five years related to the use of portfolio in nursing education. A literature review was done by searching the keywords portfolio and nursing in the databases including; Web of Science, and ProQuest and scientific search engine such as Google Scholar. After removing repetitive and non-related items, 17 articles were selected accordingly. The review of literature suggests that the portfolio is used in different schools and courses of nursing students with different goals such as assessment, evaluation, training; and performance improvement. Using portfolios has some advantages and limitations that need to be determinate for designing and implementing portfolios. Some benefits of portfolios were development of skills, fostering active learning, improvement of clinical competencies, and satisfaction of students from assessment and academic achievement. Its limitations include the lack of clarity and time constraints for completing it. The portfolio facilitates the monitoring of nurses' professional development and facilitates knowledge management. Therefore, designing and using this tool is recommended to improve the clinical competence of nursing students in undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate studies in Iran. However, the scope and purpose of using the portfolio should be specified and potential  users should be well aware of the issue and its importance, and to learn the skills necessary to use it.