Abstract:

The assessment of competences requires an approach where knowledge, abilities and attitudes are integrated, naturally implying the resource to a variety of assessment strategies. Within this context we have seen the emergence of what has been called by several authors the Assessment Culture. Necessarily, it should make use of a variety of different assessment strategies and tools, so as to better assess performance in authentic activities that should be as similar as possible to the contexts in which the competences will be implemented.
This new learning landscape has promoted the implementation of new alternative assessment strategies aligned with the most recent paradigms of assessment design (Birenbaum, 2003). These alternative assessment strategies are characterized by an integration of assessment into the learning process, a high level of student participation, the development of tasks leading to the production of artifacts, and contextualization in real world applications (Pereira, Tinoca & Oliveira, 2010).
Moreover, with the development of new ICT and the emergence of web 2.0, teaching and learning resource even more to new technological enabled content production and distribution media, as well as computer mediated communication.
In this landscape, the use of ICT to assess competences is a new challenge for the formal higher education. To clarify these issues, it’s fundamental to be more precise when we talk about assessing competences using ICT. For this reason, it is important to define a concept of e-assessment that includes tasks specifically designed for competence assessment with the support of digital technologies. In this way, we propose the concept of alternative digital assessment strategy that refers to all technology-enabled assessment tasks where the design, performance, and feedback must be mediated by technologies. Moreover, in order to assure quality assessment in Higher Education, we developed a theoretical framework supported by four dimensions – authenticity, consistency, transparency and practicability – each composed by a set of parameters, aimed at promoting the quality of the assessment strategies being used (Tinoca, Oliveira &Pereira, in press).

In this paper, we discuss in detail the criteria of authenticity, one of those dimensions, and we present four examples of alternative authentic assessment strategies, embebed in instructional design, used by different teachers in different academic contexts of Portuguese universities.

References
Birenbaum, M. (2003).New insights into learning and teaching and their implications for assessment. In M. Segers, F. J. R. C. Dochy, & E. Cascallar (Eds.), Optimising new modes of assessment: In search of qualities and standards (pp. 13–36), Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Adademic Publishers.
Pereira, A., Tinoca, L., & Oliveira, I. (2010). Authentic assessment contribution to competence based education at Universidade Aberta: Questions and challenges. In Siran Mukerji and Purnendu Tripathi (Eds.) Cases on Technological Adaptability and Transnational Learning: Issues and Challenges (pp. 266-287). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Tinoca, L., Oliveira, I. & Pereira, A. (in press). A conceptual framework for e-assessment in Higher Education – authenticity, consistency, transparency and practicability. In Siran Mukerji and Purnedu Tripathi (Eds.) Handbook of Research on Transnational Higher Education Management. IGI Global.

Keywords:

Digital assessment, competences assessment.