Assessment is how higher education institutions measure student learning and curriculum effectiveness. Most traditional assessment types — like exams and quizzes — assess how well a student has understood and retained theoretical knowledge. However, students in trade or technical schools need more than just knowledge to perform their jobs well. They need to master specific skills, too.
With competency-based assessment, your institution can assess both knowledge and skill mastery. Learn more about this assessment type and how to implement it at your institution.
A competency assessment evaluates if students have acquired the right competencies, which encompass skills, knowledge, and abilities, from an educational program. Instead of assessing how much they know, this method looks at how well students apply the knowledge and skills they’ve learned in a real-life context.
Institutions that use competency-based assessment typically let students progress through their training at their own pace and then prove their competency when they’re ready. To complete the program, students must demonstrate mastery through course assignments and tasks. These can include simulations, interviews, portfolios, and practical exams where the assessor can directly observe their performance.
With competency-based education and assessment, your institution can offer more real-life experience to students and make their training more engaging. They’ll be more prepared and confident to enter the workforce and may have an easier time landing a job. Consequently, this assessment strategy could attract new students and bolster institutional reputation.
Follow these steps to implement competency-based assessment at your institution.
Before you begin with competency-based assessment, it’s essential to consult with employers and experienced professionals within the industry. The goal of trade programs is to equip students with skills that employers need, helping improve their employability. By working directly with industry professionals for each program, you can identify the most relevant competencies to teach students.
After consulting with professionals, you should understand which competencies are the most critical for a specific job. Create a list of these competencies and outline their associated skills and knowledge. For example, consider what a student needs to know to cook an omelet well. They would need to understand how to make the omelet, which ingredient combination would taste best, and how to prepare the food safely. To cook the omelet themselves, they would need to master practical preparation, cooking, and presentation techniques.
Competencies should form the basis of the program’s learning outcomes, which outline what students should know how to do after completing the program. You’ll use learning outcomes to inform all the choices you make in the next steps.
With the competencies and learning outcomes defined, you can assess whether the existing curriculum is sufficient. Does the curriculum fully cover all the learning outcomes in the correct sequence? Curriculum mapping can help you answer this question. It involves creating a plan for when and how to teach and assess the desired learning outcomes throughout the entire program.
After the curriculum mapping process, you may have to add content and activities or remove some to better align with the program’s new learning outcomes. As you make changes, ensure the curriculum provides plenty of opportunities for hands-on experience so students can learn and apply their skills.
Now, you can decide which assessment methods work for each program’s competencies. Some assessment methods may work better for some skills than others. For example, a simulation assessment may be more practical if your institution lacks the resources to replicate a real-world scenario in person.
Consider how the student might perform the skill in their future careers to help you find the right methods. You can also take safety, practicality, and budget into account. The assessment method should provide sufficient evidence of the student’s competency.
For faculty to evaluate a student’s performance, they need a clear outline of what competency looks like. You can standardize evaluation and give assessors an outline with rubrics, which give criteria and descriptions for each competency level. They can use this information to evaluate student performance more objectively. Students can also have access to these rubrics so they know what they are being assessed on.
The success of your institution’s new competency-based assessment strategy relies on how well you train faculty. They are the ones who will carry out assessments, and they need training to do it well. Start by discussing the decision to move to competency-based assessment and how it will benefit them, students, and your institution. Then, provide training on how to adjust their teaching style and assessment methods. They may also need training on how to use the rubrics to assess student performance.
Once you have implemented your competency-based assessment strategy, monitor progress and make improvements. Continual improvement will help you boost the effectiveness of your institution’s assessments and their impact on students. To figure out which improvements to make, you can:
Implementing and evaluating competency-based assessment can be easier with the right tools, like Watermark’s Educational Impact Suite (EIS). EIS is a centralized system made up of software that can automate tasks, simplify data collection, and help you uncover insights to drive key decision-making.
Multiple tools within EIS can support your journey toward competency-based assessment. Once you’ve identified competencies for each program, you can use Watermark Curriculum Strategy to map them to your curriculum and make changes. Watermark Assessment Projects can then help you build reliable, effective rubrics and make assessment easier for faculty. Finally, Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys allows you to gather student feedback and use it to drive improvement.
Browse our full suite of software solutions online and see what Watermark’s EIS can help you achieve by requesting a demo today.
