Progettare la valutazione per competenze nell’istruzione superiore

In Italian universities, the assessment of learning too often takes a summative nature,usually associated with a passing score of a final exam, despite international literatureon the sector indicates the importance of using forms of formative assessment to improvestudents’ learning. Furthermore, forms of evaluation traditionally used do not provideus significant information about how much the student is (or will be) able to applywhat he has learned in future work and in real life contexts. Designing an assessmentbased on the acquisition of competences responds to a double need: to describe, accurately,the degree of competence performance expected by students; to initiate formsof self-assessment and peer evaluation with specific training feedback. In order to definethe skills to be assessed, the main competence descriptors defined in the European contextfor higher education are examined, which constitute an important point of referencefor starting an operationalization of the defined goals. The evaluation rubric can provideus a valuable help to operationalize skills and levels of mastery expected by the studentand to proceed with their assessment in a formative way. In this sense, some applicationsand operational examples are proposed.