Performance Descriptors - Qualitative Assessment of the Product of Students’ Activity in Primary School

Abstract

Focusing education on competences is a major concern today. The evaluation of the school acquisitions, of the students' competences, becomes an important and difficult task. We can no longer afford to evaluate by asking for the restitution of knowledge and / or the application of isolated skills, but it is necessary to confront students with complex problem situations and ask them to solve them by mobilizing all that they have learned.
According to the hypothesis of this research, if each school product will be evaluated on the basis of benchmarks that will be broken down into a set of performance indicators, each of them has performance descriptors, they will ensure the uniformity of the evaluation conditions, beyond the variety of conditions in which the education is carried out.
The first purpose of the research was to identify how teachers for primary school can provide a unitary assessment for students, nationally, if the process and product of education or learning is related to the curricular and performance standards established at the national level.
The results indicate that, it is not easy for the teachers to evaluate the competences of the students, because they do not know very well about what complex of situations reveal the learning achievements so they can estimate the level of students in mastery of competences.