Skills assessment: a host of challenges

What should we assess: knowledge or skills? The development of competencies requires the acquisition of knowledge, but above all the application of that knowledge to accomplish tasks or solve problems independently and effectively. This approach to teaching, based on skills rather than knowledge, has been adopted from primary school to university level in Quebec and elsewhere in the world. While the assessment of knowledge is relatively straightforward, the assessment of skills is rather complex, as it is multidimensional, posing a number of challenges. This book highlights some of the challenges that accompany the assessment of competencies, whether these are professional (e.g., in engineering) or disciplinary (e.g., in French), and whether the assessment modalities are aimed at assessment for learning, assessment for learning or assessment of learning. An incursion into a number of disciplinary fields will enable the reader to grasp some of the challenges posed by competency assessment. The questions that emerge from the various chapters are bound to inspire students, teachers, researchers and decision-makers to do even better when it comes to skills assessment.