Bekwaam beoordeeld : inhoud, functie en kwaliteit van competentiegerichte assessments in social work opleidingen

In order to make them more relevant to professional practice, a significant shift among Dutch Higher Vocational Education (HBO) programmes towards competence-based education and assessments has taken place. This research has been carried out to contribute to the development of the quality of competence-based assessments, especially in view of the predictive validity of first year assessments for second and third year internship assessments. First a comprehensive model of the concept of competence has been devised. The model exists of three interrelated dimensions (knowledge base, professional performance, developability) that form the heart of professional competences. In order to be able to assess a person’s competence evidence must be found relating to all three dimensions and how they are interrelated. Second a framework has been devised to determine the quality of competence-based assessments. In this framework three aspects are important: 1) what is being assessed, 2) how the assessing is done, and 3) what the purpose is of carrying out the assessment. These three aspects were used as the basis for devising an instrument. In a pilot research the quality of the instrument was tested and in a subsequent research a panel used the instrument to determine the quality profiles of seven competence-based assessments of the first year of the social work programmes of Hogeschool Utrecht. The research showed that it was possible to establish a quality profile for each of the assessments which illuminates the strong and weak points of the assessments. A third research study was focused on the quality of competence-based assessments of internships. This study made clear that according to the assessors the dimensions of competences are given equal consideration but that not all competences of the study programme are relevant to internships. The assessors tend to have a holistic style of assessment as their assessment of competences is based on a general impression. Both the internship assessors and the students believe that the assessments contribute very strongly to the intern’s learning. Because the assessment of the internships is partly based on self-assessments a fourth research was executed at their quality. The outcomes demonstrated that self-assessments of third-year students appear to be more realistic than second-year students and that students who perform poorly in internships have a tendency to strongly overrate themselves in their self-assessments. The final study examined the predictive value of first year assessments for the assessment of the internships in the second and third year of social work education at Hogeschool Utrecht and the relation between the predictive validity of the first year assessments and their quality profiles. This research showed that there appeared to be a certain link between the marks for the first year assessments and those for the second-year internship but not for third-year internships. The previously determined quality profiles of the first year assessments revealed that assessments in the first year in which the capacity to develop and, in particular, reflection are assessed, can to a certain degree predict students’ competences as assessed in their second-year internships.