Abstract:

In the context of higher education, a competence may be understood as the combination of skills, knowledge, attitudes, values and abilities that underpin effective and/or superior performance in a professional area. This paper 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;

Finally, we were interested in using assessment results to give feedback on competence development to students, their tutors and the institution which holds them. The sample of students includes 1st and 3rd year students and we shall report specifically on one of the competences, namely understanding scientific texts at the level of university studies. We shall describe the process of development of the test and discuss some measures taken to guarantee an acceptable level of objectivity and validity of the data. At a later stage, we shall report some results of data analyses carried regarding results achieved at the two participating academic levels. Finally, we shall discuss our experience in the use of these procedures as well as the implications for the development of this kind of tests and its crucial role in higher education reform. This work was supported by the University of Jaén (Spain), project PID34_201416

Keywords:

Generic skills, assessment procedures, learning outcomes assessment.