Abstract:

Educational assessment, understanding as the act of interpretation of student learning outcomes, suffered a deep change. The present paper peruses distinctive aspects of the assessment process, dropped in a formative setting, and striving to understand the didactic action multidimensionality’s always more oriented to promote meaningful learning. Sure enough, evaluation, assumes an information character designed to understand the path taken in relation to the objectives and to the project that has been earlier developed. Planning, assessment and teaching actions are part of a systemic nature perspective, that is the expression of the construct of competence, as a consequence, these three moments are considered part of a single process. Planning procedures, activity doing and assessment techniques deeply change. Starting from a plural description of the concept of competence, in the first part of this paper, it outlines the theoretical framework in which are included new forms of learning assessment, oriented to the acquisition of self-assessment and co-assessment processes of learner, not only the typical teaching practices made by tradition assessment. It follows an alternative assessment, the so-called authentic assessment, which measures the students ability to mobilize their knowledge to resolve problem, refusing traditional testing. Authentic evaluation is closely related to a constructivist mold of didactic that is aimed to develop complex competences. Following the theoretical first part, the second part of this paper has a practical-operative nature, wherein are inserted the actions to be implemented for the construction of authentic tasks. Competence assessment depends on the type of task addressed that permit to capture the plurality of performance through which the competence is clear. It’s necessary to adopt a multiperspective approach to build assessment tools focused and differentiated. Newness and complexity become the characteristic features of the authentic tasks, that aim to highlight the ways in which the student uses his knowledge, starts his cognitive processes and adopts resolved strategies to achieve the goal.

Keywords:

Educational assessment, competence, meaningful learning, authentic assessment, construction of authentic tasks.