Actions: The assessment
The curriculum based on learning experiences, which is a structural part of the Learning by Languages Method® (LbyL), allows children to participate in complex activities that promote competences that are essential for their subsequent development, such as metacognition, the ability to collaborate with peers and understand the point of view of others, the ability to design and explore, the ability to combine their forms of knowledge creatively and to express themselves through the different symbolic systems characteristic of a given culture. The methods of assessment proposed are therefore different from the kind of simple standardized tasks that break down competence into basic components, each associated with a task to be carried out in a sequence and limited to providing an expected answer.
In the LbyL method, the assessment of evolving competences is carried out while maintaining the complexity of the children’s activity, precisely in order to ensure that the concept of competence remains comprehensive (the ability to tackle a complex experiential situation, for which no simple or automatic procedures exist). The possibility of tackling complex and open activities allows the teachers to appraise the development of competences in context, to make informal assessments of the learning taking place, and to provide scaffolding opportunities that are more effective insofar as they are closer to the children’s zone of proximal development.
According to the LbyL method, assessment should focus on the following different levels:
The children’s participation in the activities linked to the various fields of experience, maintaining the complexity of the activities and the possibility for children to follow different paths in the development of their competences;
The children’s potential competences, based on the idea that what they do in collaboration and through scaffolding strategies are the potential competences that each child internalizes in the future;
The type of scaffolding required by the children in order to develop their competences;
The children’s interactive competences;
The children’s individual progress over the course of time, through portfolio-like compilations and open tasks for assessing competence goals (expected outcomes).