A Formal Model of Competence-Based Assessment

• Authors: Teresa Alsinet;David Barroso;Ramón Béjar;Jordi Planes
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Artificial Intelligence Research and Development: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence
• Year: 2009

The Bologna Declaration of June 1999 has put in motion a series of reforms needed to create a European Higher Education Area by 2010. One of the most important reforms refers to the pedagogic model defining a competence-based student-centered education model. In this model, the identification of individual ability, talent, and aptitude is deemed to be very important, and the key task of education is self-actualization through recognition and cultivation of such talents and abilities in order to develop competences. Therefore both planning continuing education activities and evaluating these activities after its completion are key processes of such innovative education model. In this paper we present a robust and formal model for developing an evaluation plan of education activities and evaluating these activities after its completion. The aim of the evaluation process is to determine the degree of achievement of competences developed by students during the execution of some continuing education activity. Our approach uses ontologies as formal knowledge representation model to help teachers in developing an evaluation plan of education activities oriented to determine the degree of competence achievement. Once the ontology model of the evaluation plan of an education activity is defined, we propose to use existing reasoning tools to determine the degree of achievement of competences after the activity completion. The resulting evaluation framework is a first approach to a competence-based student-centered evaluation model and can be used as a proof-of-concept system.