Abstract:

This work describes part of the study undertaken with the overall aim of gaining experience in the assessment of learning outcomes in Biology and, more specifically with the goal to develop assessment procedures showing the features required for measurements which may inform decisions of some relevance to people who take them.

The process of development of tests to carry out the assessment of learning outcomes related to these competences, as well as some basic features regarding their reliability and validity is described and results on the comparison of results achieved at two academic levels also be described.
The main achievement of this study seems to be that indeed we have succeeded in the development of a procedure to measure learning outcomes which can be taken as a base for future developments.

It was carried out with the main goal of gaining experience in the assessment of learning outcomes and, more specifically to:
1) designing some procedures for the assessment of learning outcomes;
2) testing some basic psychometric features that an assessment device with some consequences for the subjects being evaluated needs to prove;
3) an issue of special interest for us was testing different procedures of standard setting
4) using assessment results as orienting feedback to students and their tutors.

Keywords:

Learning outcomes assessment, higher education, competence based education.