Probing and Proving Competence

Since 1997 the Amsterdam Faculty of Education (EFA) has been officially recognised as a Dutch centre for experimental teacher education. EFA is a co-operation institute of the Hogeschool Inholland and the Hogeschool of Amsterdam. In this paper we will describe the essentials of an assessment system and a web-based portfolio system that should help students take responsibility for their learning and their proving competence at three consecutive integrative assessments. The whole Faculty with 3500 students has embarked on a transition from “supply driven education and assessing whether the supply is absorbed by the student” to “demand driven education and challenging students to prove in their own way that they are competent”. To support the understanding of portfolio use, the new concept of curriculum for educating higher-level professionals is discussed briefly. We will stress the aspect that a new educational concept can only be successful in implementation if the assessment system is correspondingly altered. ICT plays an important role in this change. The portfolio system helps people, under their own responsibility, to collect materials that can be used and re-used at different times for different purposes: - learning (probing your learning processes, often with help of feedback by other people) - assessing (proving competence, towards an outside authority; e.g. to gain admission to the next phase of the course, or to get a job, or to get admission to a next level of job) - sharing (products and expertise should be part of a knowledge base; "unknown" people should be able to find them) The nice thing about web-based portfolio is that you can use the same materials for those different purposes. Materials over the years can be ordered at different times for different purposes. For each purpose you pick a selection of the materials and cement them together (with a storyline) into a structure that serves the purpose. The portfolio system is now in use for three years. Information can be found at the EFA publication site: http://www.efa.nl/publicaties/english.html