A Research-based Teacher Professional Development pathway with follow-up on the assessment and certification of competences in primary and lower secondary education

Abstract

The growing attention of education policies to the development of students’ competences and to the improvement of schools conceived as learning organizations also raises new questions in the field of assessment, highlighting the need for new approaches, methods, and tools for evaluation and monitoring. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological perspective of authentic assessment, this paper presents a Research-based Teacher Professional Development pathway with follow-up involving researchers from the University of Florence and a group of primary and lower secondary schools in Tuscany, aimed at developing shared models for the assessment and certification of student competences. The pathway consists of two studies – a main study and a follow-up study – conducted at different times in order to examine the validity and reliability of the assessment rubrics developed by the project team and to foster the professional development of both researchers and teachers in this area.

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