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 literature on the sector indicates the importance of using forms of formative assessment to improve students’ learning. Furthermore, forms of evaluation traditionally used do not provide us significant information about how much the student is (or will be) able to apply what he has learned in future work and in real life contexts. Designing an assessment based on the acquisition of competences responds to a double need: to describe, accurately, the degree of competence performance expected by students; to initiate forms of self-assessment and peer evaluation with specific training feedback. In order to define the skills to be assessed, the main competence descriptors defined in the European context for higher education are examined, which constitute an important point of reference for starting an operationalization of the defined goals. The evaluation rubric can provide us a valuable help to operationalize skills and levels of mastery expected by the student and to proceed with their assessment in a formative way. In this sense, some applications and operational examples are proposed.