Abstract:

A Competency-Based Professional Development intends to generate quality educational processes in which forms of knowledge (content), the ways to do (methods and activities), the development of thinking tools (capacity and ability) as well as the shades of feeling (values and attitudes) are aimed to progressive individual and group development towards meeting the demands of society, the profession, discipline development and academic work.

This educational model differs from others due to the fact that developing competencies is much larger than to claim that the student reaches knowledge in context. Competencies go beyond the mere performance, implying further commitment, willingness to perform tasks with quality, reasoning, understanding, and managing conceptual fundamentals.

Moreover, its attributes confer professional educational due to a) the integration of the thriad: knowledge, capacity and skills, b) criteria for grading in accordance with the requirements of each area of knowledge, personal domain, scaffolding instruction, the complexity of cognitive processing and the norms, focusing on performance and be contextual; c) objective standards of performance expected; d) observable demonstration: performance, evidence of conscious action based on the personal resources developed empirically and formally and e) the cognitive strategies involved in particular and specific situations.
Evaluation in a Competency-Based Professional Development, demands the teacher to design instruments according to the capacity, content and assessment criteria not only of the observable, but the context mobilizing the cognitive and socio-affective dimensions of student. These instruments contain the criteria to assess the performance evidence: way to confront problem situations; the knowledge evidence: founded and reasoned argument and justification; and the product evidence: according to specifications.

In educational practice, it is difficult to assess intellectual functions as critique, analysis, opinion, creation and even more difficult is to assess the attitudes, habits, disposition, willingness and reasons. Based on this and considering the assessment as an incentive to build knowledge and develop competencies, five different procedures of assessing were designed: 1) matrixes (analytic rubrics) providing a description of the performance and skills or abilities of the student applied to the activity in each category to assess, from a continuum of standards, which undoubtedly allows for greater consistency in evaluations; 2) synthetic rubrics for peer and self assessment by which the students evaluate the characteristics of quality work developed by each one of the collaborative members during a psychological intervention project; 3) project evaluation by the beneficiary in order to get feedback on three aspects of the formative activity: quality, pertinence, and results; 4) dialectic, a collaborative blog in which students interact assessing the published project outcomes of the other teams in the learning community; and 5) self assessment of metacognitive awareness of the self-regulation during real-life project performance.

Keywords:

Competency, assessment, evidence, rubrics, metacognitive.