Abstract:

The Bologna Declaration of June 1999 has put in motion a series of reforms needed to create a European Higher Education Area by 2010. One of the most important reform refers to the pedagogic model, defining a competence-based student-centered education model. In such a model, the identification of individual ability, talent, and aptitude is deemed to be very important, and the key task of education is self-actualization through recognition and cultivation of such talents and abilities in order to develop competences. Therefore both developing an evaluation plan of education activities and evaluating these activities after its completion, are key processes.

Our aim is to help teachers in this processes by using semantic web technologies, especially those related with knowledge representation and knowledge discovery.

In this paper we present (i) a formal model for representing competences, measurable indicators, accomplishment degrees of the indicators, learning activities and evaluation activities; and (ii) a support system for the continuous evaluation based on the above formal model.

The formal model of representation is based on ontologies and the support system is based on a set of evaluation constraints associated with the continuous evaluation process. An ontology is a formal and consensual specification of knowledge; it introduces vocabulary describing various aspects of the domain being modeled and provides an explicit specification of the intended meaning of that vocabulary. Moreover, the specification can include relations among entities of the described domain. This feature allows us to specify relations between competences, measurable indicators, degrees of accomplishment and learning or evaluation activities.

Our main motivation for using ontologies as formal model of knowledge representation is, on the one hand, to automatically check the evaluation constraints and, on the other hand, to use general purpose reasoning tools for automatically checking whether indicators validate the level of competence achieved. To automatically check the evaluation constraints we explore the use of integrity constraints in the framework of ontologies. The resulting evaluation framework is a first approach to a competence-based student-centered evaluation model and can be used as a proof-of-concept system.

Keywords:

European Higher Education Area, competence, continuous evaluation, ontology, integrity constraints.