Premises

PREMISES: STUDENTS’ ASSESSMENT, ECTS AND MICRO-CREDENTIALS

Students’ assessment in Higher Education (HE) is essential to certification, recognition and transparency and constitutes an effective element enhancing student’s motivation. In addition to formal “summative” assessment assuring information for the formal certification, “formative” assessment allows to monitor student learning, provide ongoing feedback, improve teaching and learning; it also helps students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need to work on and help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately. Formative assessment in the form of regular, specific, timely feedback should be prioritised in any comprehensive assessment plan.

In the framework of the European Credit Transfer System - ECTS, credits can only be awarded after a successful completion of the work required and appropriate assessment of the learning outcomes achieved. As defined by ECVET, Learning Outcomes are “sets of competencies, expressing what the student will know, understand or be able to do after completion of a process of learning, long or short”. To be able to recognize and validate competences in the framework of ECTS, in compliance with the main EU VET standards such as ECVET, HE students’ assessment should be “learning-outcome oriented”. This means that teachings, courses and programmes should clearly identify the Learning Outcomes (LOs) they ought to achieve and therefore allow the assessment of each LO’s achievement.

TEAMCARE’s Curriculum also complies with the new “European approach to micro-credentials for lifelong learning and employability” [EC, 2022], the European Council Recommendation published on June 2022: it defines the new concept of ‘Micro-credential’ as “the record of the learning outcomes that a learner has acquired following a small volume of learning”. These learning outcomes must be assessed “against transparent and clearly defined criteria”. Learning experiences leading to micro-credentials are designed to provide the learner with specific knowledge, skills and competences that respond to societal, personal, cultural or labour market needs. Micro-credentials are owned by the learner, can be shared and are portable. They may be stand-alone or combined into larger credentials.

In such context, “assessment means the process or method used to evaluate, measure and eventually describe the learning outcomes acquired by individuals through formal, non-formal or informal settings. Assessment is performed by the provider or other recognised assessment providers” [EC, 2022]. In a recent report, CEDEFOP [2024] states that micro-credentials are assessed in different ways across Europe: assessment approaches on micro-credential vary notably, with different national views on the description and assessment of qualifications and on the validation of prior learning; recent assessment models include the use of portfolios allowing for stacking of micro-credentials, and simulations [CEDEFOP, 2024].

As shown by MICROBOL [2022] project, which has engaged ministries and stakeholders involved in the Bologna Follow-up Group to explore whether and how the existing European Higher Education Area (EHEA), tools can be used and/or need to be adapted to be applicable to micro-credentials, states that micro-credentials can only be recognized on the basis of a proof of the learning outcomes achieved by a learner, according to transparent requirements and after assessment. The assessment is performed by nationally recognized higher education institutions or other recognized assessment providers as part of its national quality assurance framework. Assessment must be reliable, regardless of the assessment method used (computer-based, teacher-based, mixed). The assessment must be fairly applied to all students and carried out in accordance with the stated procedures. It needs to be valid and allow students to demonstrate the extent to which the micro-credential intended learning outcomes and competences have been achieved.

In complex curricula, the assessment of each LO can be very burdensome. To this end, LOs are often grouped into units or modules and assessments tools are designed to assess sets of LOs.

LEARNING OUTCOMES FORMULATION AND ASSESSMENT DESIGN

Learning outcomes should be clear, verifiable and assessable, in order to enable learners and teachers to judge whether the results have actually been achieved.

Generally LOs should [Alvino & Mazzarino, 2018; Alvino et al., 2023]:

• be described from the perspective of the learner; LOs do not describe the learning target or the learning path, but the result following the completion of a learning process.
• be based on active verbs, as measurable or observable actions;
• be specific and contextualized; it is essential to provide an indication as to what the knowledge and skills of the graduates refer to, and as to what kind of performance is concerned;
• be described briefly and precisely and should be externally verifiable; the formulations must be chosen in a way that allows the evaluation process to determine if the learner has achieved the learning outcomes;
• be realistic to be achieved within the time and the resources available.
• specify the mastery level: verbs, adjectives and context descriptions, should reflect the level of the specific learning outcomes.

The way LOs are worded informs the ASSESSMENT CRITERIA AND METHODS used to check whether or not the particular LOs have been achieved. So, after defining the learning outcomes and strategies of your course, the main information necessary to define a consistent set of assessment criteria has been determined. The LO’s helps us to identify what the learner should actually do to show competence. The LO should also state the expected level of the competence as well as the level of responsibility and autonomy of the learner.

To define the assessment CRITERIA this information should be integrated with the definition of the ASSESSEMENT CONDITIONS. Sometimes a description of the professional situation could be very useful, as well as the reference to the “key activities” analysed at the beginning of the design process. Additional conditions (requirements) can be also defined; for instance, to emulate real-life professional working conditions, a limited amount of time can be assigned daily for each activity, so that the person under assessment operates in similar stress conditions; the equipment available must be clearly defined, as well as specific products and technical support in accordance to the professional situation under evaluation.

Figure 1 outlines the detailed description of a LO drawn from the “Specialist in CBIT for person-centered care” Curriculum. Such a description is compliant with the list of requisites described at the beginning of this section. Active verbs describe in detail what a student is supposed to know and to do once achieved the learning outcome. They clearly provide an important input to identify the proper methods, to check the declared knowledge and to allow the students to show his/her skills. In addition, the choice of some verbs such as “masters” or “describe and outline” mirrors the intended level of the competence.

Assessment criteria should be transparent to students and formalized in the proper design documents.

Figure 1: The description of a LO drawn from TEAMCARE’s Curriculum

Once the criteria are defined, the design of the assessment should go deeper, defining specific method (such as tests) or activities (such as problem-solving activities, demonstrations, etc.) There’s no magic formula to solve design problems and there’s no effective assessment method for every context, target user and learning outcome. Anyway, some hints could be useful to this end. First of all, the more complex the cognitive tasks are the more active, situated and contextualized the activities performed to learn them should be, as well as the assessment methods testing the mastery of the competence.

TEAMCARE’s Curriculum competencies have been defined through 3 main dimensions: knowledge, skills and attitudes; each dimension can characterize the whole competence in different percentages, so sometimes a dimension can be prevalent or not present;

• when the “knowledge” (theoretical and factual) dimension is prevalent, “traditional” assessment methods, such as oral or written exams can be affectively adopted;
• when the “skills” dimension is prevalent, active practice is fundamental and learners should be involved in activities which allow the opportunity to practice the task; learning strategies such as learning-by-doing, work based learning, problem-based learning, simulations, should be implemented to address the skills and the assessment methods selected to test the achievement of LOs should foster such “active and contextualized enactment” of the skill;
• when the “attitude” dimension is prevalent, learners should be actively involved in situated and contextualized activities. Individual or collaborative or cooperative tasks may be useful, to support the enactment of the attitude that have to be assessed.

When a competence (and the related LO) is articulated in many dimensions, different assessment methods can be integrated in order to investigate the different components of the competence. Especially, when practical skills and social skills are investigated, the observation of a student in a practical activity, a simulation or in work based learning (WBL) is useful for an authentic assessment. A list of possible assessment methods is provided on the next page.