Skills Development: Vocational Education
in the Islamic Countries
22
 Performance tasks: The instructor requires a student to demonstrate their ability to
perform certain actions practically. This assessment requires a student to do more than
just giving fact by designing products or experiments, gathering information, tabulating,
analyzing, interpreting results and preparing reports to express his facts in a more
acceptable manner. The vocational educators have relied on performance based
assessment strategies to judge student mastery of job-specific skills. A computer science
teacher will judgewhether a student can open the computer and reassemble it without
any difficulties.
 Senior Project: Unlike written and performance task assessments, senior project
assessment reflects the work done over an extended period of time. Senior project
comprises of three components: a research paper; a product or activity; and a
presentation. This type of assessment also requires teachers’ collaboration, unlike the
former ones, from different subjects to provide the students with guidance so as to
complete tasks efficiently. Evaluating this kind of assessment is quite challenging as
most teachers spend a considerable amount of time analyzing various elements like
content, technical knowledge, organization of the content, time management,
communication skills and appearance.
 Portfolios: This is a cumulative assessment that shows quality of a student'swork and
documents his performance. It comprises of the above two or more forms of
assessments plus additional materials like student-written information, official records
about the student and others. The other records might include certificates, transcripts,
resumes, journals, recommendations and grades. These content reflect student’s
accomplishment whether academic or industrial career but from authentic sources and
later a student might be required to orally appear in a presentation.
Besides NCRVE suggested assessment technique, Competence Based Assessment (CBA) has
been highly recommended by most researchers as one of the most efficient assessment
technique in vocational education (Duong, 2016, 2018; Thuy, 2015). According to Duong
(2016), “CBA is an assessment approach based on learning outcomes (subjects or
curriculum) or professional standards tomake judgments onwhether competence has been
achieved through evidences associated with flexible application of knowledge, skills,
attitudes, values and personal attributes such as motives, interests, needs, beliefs and so on
in dealing with real-world problems”.
In CBA, the assessment objective is to examine the extent of competence that has been
achieved by the student rather than how much knowledge has been accumulated (Duong,
2018). For an effective CBA assessment tool, the following steps need to be followed, as
described by Thuy (2015)
 Define the performance areas and competences to be assessed
 Define the expected characteristic features of the competence
 Identify specific assessment criteria.
 Build the score scale.
 Consolidate the assessment tool
An example of implementation of the above steps was mentioned by Duong (2016) while
assessing problem solving competence based on Polya's Problem Solving Techniques (Polya)
and Problem solving rubric with the help of CBA assessment technique , as shown in the table
1.2, below.