Continuous assessment and synthetic assessment – elements of pedagogical technique. Curriculum Case Study: Personal Development

Abstract

The contemporary paradigm of the competence-centered curriculum associates an essential consequence at the level of the design, implementation and evaluation of school learning: the resizing of acquisitions in the form of knowledge, skills and attitudes (see Pre-university Education Law, 2023, art. 85). As a result, any finality expressed within the intended curriculum (represented by the school curriculum) in the form of the specific competence must be subjected to a pedagogical derivation approach to obtain the set of the three components. Through successive derivation steps, at a specific and operational level, the final portfolio of acquisitions will be established for each representative learning sequence (lesson), implicitly a lucid vision at the level of key contents, didactic strategies (and the methods derived from them), learning experiences and the micro-temporal resources corresponding to these resources. Like any rational human activity, the learning-teaching binomial is subject to an assessment approach, prioritized synchronously to avoid "losses" or "falling behind" and to ensure immediate optimizing interventions. Thus, an assessment will be practiced that will regulate and nurture learning in a continuous way, i.e. a formative assessment. The intention of this paper is to provide two planes of knowledge: a declarative knowledge and a procedural one. At the declarative level, a transparency of the formative evaluation is proposed, addressed both through its functions (observation-detection, adjustment-optimization, expansion-deepening), and through the forms of expression (continuous and synthetic). At the procedural level, a model-matrix is provided to ensure these evaluation approaches (continuous and synthetic), in relation to the three types of acquisitions derived from the specific competence (knowledge, skills, attitudes), within a curricular case study (Personal Development discipline).