INTEGRAL COMPETENCE EVALUATION

Abstract

A Competency-Based Professional Development intends to generate qualityeducational processes in which forms of knowledge (content), the ways todo (methods and activities), the development of thinking tools (capacityand ability) as well as the shades of feeling (values and attitudes) areaimed to progressive individual and group development towards meetingthe demands of society, the profession, discipline development andacademic work.This educational model differs from others due to the fact thatdeveloping competencies is much larger than to claim that the studentreaches knowledge in context. Competencies go beyond the mereperformance, implying further commitment, willingness to perform taskswith quality, reasoning, understanding, and managing conceptualfundamentals.Moreover, its attributes confer professional educational due to a) theintegration of the thriad: knowledge, capacity and skills, b) criteriafor grading in accordance with the requirements of each area ofknowledge, personal domain, scaffolding instruction, the complexity ofcognitive processing and the norms, focusing on performance and becontextual; c) objective standards of performance expected; d)observable demonstration: performance, evidence of conscious actionbased on the personal resources developed empirically and formally ande) the cognitive strategies involved in particular and specificsituations.Evaluation in a Competency-Based Professional Development, demands theteacher to design instruments according to the capacity, content andassessment criteria not only of the observable, but the contextmobilizing the cognitive and socio-affective dimensions of student.These instruments contain the criteria to assess the performanceevidence: way to confront problem situations; the knowledge evidence:founded and reasoned argument and justification; and the productevidence: according to specifications.In educational practice, it is difficult to assess intellectualfunctions as critique, analysis, opinion, creation and even moredifficult is to assess the attitudes, habits, disposition, willingnessand reasons. Based on this and considering the assessment as anincentive to build knowledge and develop competencies, five differentprocedures of assessing were designed: 1) matrixes (analytic rubrics)providing a description of the performance and skills or abilities ofthe student applied to the activity in each category to assess, from acontinuum of standards, which undoubtedly allows for greater consistencyin evaluations; 2) synthetic rubrics for peer and self assessment bywhich the students evaluate the characteristics of quality workdeveloped by each one of the collaborative members during apsychological intervention project; 3) project evaluation by thebeneficiary in order to get feedback on three aspects of the formativeactivity: quality, pertinence, and results; 4) dialectic, acollaborative blog in which students interact assessing the publishedproject outcomes of the other teams in the learning community; and 5)self assessment of metacognitive awareness of the self-regulation duringreal-life project performance.