Abstract:

Different educational levels are promoting a model based on the development and assessment of professional competences, proposed by The European Higher Education Area (EHEA), on the Bologna Declaration. This learning process, including assessment, needs to be designed and implemented according to the competences acquired by students to achieve learning results previously expected. To do this, it is necessary to design learning activities and to know the way they are assessed.

Learning assessment needs to be aligned with learning activities, intending to provide students the possibility of accomplishing learning results and becoming more competitive. For this reason, people responsible for the education and learning process, need to plan activities and the way results are assessed.
Assessment is a crucial step in the education and learning process. It is necessary to monitor and improve the whole process, as well as to assess learning performance for every student individually. The use of an assessment with training purposes promotes a greater student’s commitment and helps detect deviations in competence acquisition to be solved over time.

The competency-based learning process has provoked such a transformation in the higher-education field that has attempted to satisfy current training requirements. In this context, at university, the use of rubrics is considered as an innovative educational tool, promoting competence assessment both for students and professors. Rubrics have become an important tool for competence assessment and customized feedback, them both being considered as a useful way to unify criteria for activity development and assessment, that is to say, uniting the assessment criteria.

Rubrics permit to manage expectations for an activity or task, defining indicators that reflect the sides of the task subject to assessment, performance levels indicating the quality achieved and criteria to assign those performance levels and, using this quality, acquiring and demonstrating the expected competences.

Rubric design is not only a simple task for the professors responsible for both the subject and the activity, but it demands to define the competences that the student must acquire and demonstrate through the assessment. Some technological tools facilitate this task, although these tools are unknown. In this work, some tools and TIC platforms are presented to facilitate and standardize evaluation rubric design in different areas, according to the activity to be developed and assessed, as Rubistar CoRubric, ERubrica, and Microsoft Teams, together with some recommendations and a rubric example applied to students of Physics for Computer Science in the Degree in Computer Science and Engineering, offered by the School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), on Albacete campus.

Keywords:

Learning process, learning assessment, competence assessment, tools, TIC platforms, rubrics.