Guidelines for designing competency-based assessment

In education, the fundamental purpose of assessment is to help determine and understand where learners are in their journey so we can make evidence-based decisions. Assessments tell us what students know, understand, and can do. The process of assessment is a meaningful, positive, and empowering learning experience for students that yields timely, relevant, and actionable evidence.

Over the past few decades, educators and policymakers have recognised the need for transitioning to competency-based assessments. Students need to develop practical skills, critical thinking, and skills for the real-world application of concepts to succeed. Therefore, we need assessments that measure these competencies and skills. 

Traditional curriculum-based assessments focus on whether students have acquired (memorised) specific content. Competency-based assessments focus on students’ mastery of knowledge, skills and abilities, including providing meaningful and actionable feedback to students with an emphasis on improvement in performance rather than merely focusing on test scores or grades. So assessment becomes a process to collect evidence about the knowledge and skills acquired by the students to support them, based on their individual learning needs.

Creating competency-based assessments is academically stimulating. Constructing a high-quality competency-based assessment task involves multiple steps, with each step demanding specific knowledge and skills and encouraging us to be creative.

An appropriate assessment model

Developing competency-based assessments can be challenging. We need to develop tasks that map precisely to the measurable attributes of a competency and to have a clear understanding of what a progression from less advanced skills to more advanced skills actually looks like.

Teachers often find it difficult to select the appropriate assessment model and follow a consistent method of observing and marking students in a uniform and fair manner. Irrespective of the purpose of the assessment (assessment of learning, for learning or as learning), competency-based assessment may include selected response or constructed response questions; performance-based, portfolio-based, or rubric-based evaluation. While an objective assessment gives a precise and clear indication of a student’s strengths and weaknesses, subjective assessments provide scope to capture divergent thinking among students.

Subjective assessment is often seen as biased form of assessment. However, if supported with a robust, well-designed rubric demonstrating progression of student learning, it can measure relevant skills and attributes effectively. Rubrics also guide students on what they need to do to improve and master the skill required.

Reflecting on the robustness of the performance criteria to provide valuable feedback is an integral part of competency-based assessment. While rubrics to measure student progress and inform teaching are often used for formative assessment, rubrics with marking schemes can be used for awarding grades in summative assessment.

It is most important not to just develop the assessment tool based on best practices, but to set up a robust quality assurance process to ensure that the resulting assessment is superior. A precision tool may not work if it is not valid and reliable for a given context. The quality assurance process should also ensure that the assessment is fair to all target audiences. After creating an assessment task, teachers should peer review, update, and refine not only the task but also the rubric.

The key steps in creating competency-based assessments

Multiple steps are involved in designing and creating competency-based assessments. A logical flow looks like this:

1. articulating the purpose of the assessment
2. identifying the competencies to be assessed
3. selecting key learning outcomes (learning standards)
4. developing the performance criteria for the selected standard
5. selecting the appropriate assessment task type that is most likely to provide evidence of students’ achievement levels in an objective manner
6. designing suitable assessment tasks and scoring rubrics.

Apart from this, setting up a robust quality assurance mechanism at the start of assessment development is also a key prerequisite to ensuring that the assessment model succeeds as expected. 

Sample competency-based assessment tasks (paper-pen based)

The tasks provided below are based on a few general competencies and encompass scope for further improvement based on feedback from practicing teachers.

Sample task 1:

The teacher creates an assignment for the students as part of formative assessment. The objective is to assess students’ ability to gather secondary data from reliable sources, represent the data using a suitable tool, make conclusions from the available data, and then reflect on and relate the data to the problem being investigated.

Students are advised to investigate two pest control methods (biological and chemical) to examine their effectiveness on crop yield. Students must gather at least 3 years of consecutive data to be able to make a reliable comparison between the 2 methods on their effectiveness on crop yield.

The following rubric could be used as a guide to evaluate students’ performance for Task 1

Sample task 2:

The teacher creates a multiple-choice question to evaluate student’s analytical thinking as a part of summative assessment. The learning outcome is that students can analyse an experimental set up to identify the problem.

In task 2, the student compares four differently coloured cans containing water and a thermometer. All 4 response options are related to the context. By analysing student’s choice of option, the teacher can diagnose strengths and weaknesses of students and provide feedback to learners on identifying their areas of improvement.

Find out more: To know more about our professional development programmes on competency-based assessment at school, please contact sales.india@acer.org