Vurderingskompetanse

Vurderingskompetanse is the professional capacity to plan, conduct, interpret, and act on assessments of learners’ or clients’ competences. It covers designing assessment tasks aligned with intended learning outcomes, choosing appropriate methods, and ensuring results are credible and usable for decisions about progression, certification, or feedback. Central to vurderingskompetanse are validity (measuring what is intended), reliability (consistent judgments), fairness (no discrimination), and transparency (clear criteria). It also includes ethical considerations, data privacy, and respectful communication of results.

Components and practices include developing learning outcomes, designing assessments, creating rubrics, setting standards, moderating judgments, and employing feedback strategies. Formative assessment aims to support learning, while summative assessment certifies competence. Methods range from exams and performance tasks to portfolios and both peer and self-assessment. The choice of method depends on context and goals. Professional development, collaboration among assessors, and formal quality assurance processes are essential to maintain assessment quality.

Contexts for vurderingskompetanse span education, higher education, vocational training, health and social care, and human resources. In Norway, vurderingskompetanse is emphasized in teacher education and professional development, with national guidelines from the Directorate for Education and Training to support fair and valid assessments.

Challenges include possible biases, language and cultural differences, workload and time constraints, ensuring consistency across assessors, and aligning assessments with standards. Effective use of assessment data for program improvement, and providing timely, actionable feedback to learners, are important outcomes of strong vurderingskompetanse.