Assessing LifeComp competences in the classroom

The legitimate fear

Many teachers stop short of assessing transversal competences for a serious reason: they are afraid of assessing the person instead of the work. The fear is well founded. Writing "does not collaborate" in an assessment record describes a trait, not a performance, and it is a judgement a student carries around.

LifeComp offers the way out, but it has to be used precisely.

The rule: competence is observed in a task

The 9 LifeComp competences are described across three levels -- awareness, understanding, action -- and that is the foothold. You do not assess whether a student is empathetic. You observe whether, in this specific task, they recognised a classmate's state and took it into account.

The difference between those two formulations is not diplomatic: the first is not verifiable, the second is.

Four devices that work

1. The task with a group constraint. Work that cannot be completed alone makes collaboration observable. The constraint has to be designed: if the task is divisible into independent parts, students will divide it and nobody will collaborate.

2. The mid-course change of brief. Changing a requirement once work is under way makes flexibility observable. Those who revise the design and those who dig in are plainly distinguishable, and nothing needs interpreting.

3. The contradictory source. Providing two documents saying incompatible things makes critical thinking observable. The competence is not picking the right one: it is recognising there is a contradiction and arguing how you handle it.

4. The short learning journal. Three lines at the end of an activity -- what I understood, what I found hard, what I will do differently -- makes managing learning and self-regulation observable. It only works if it is not graded for writing quality.

What to avoid

• Self-declared questionnaires as an assessment instrument. They are useful for making a student reflect on themselves, not for assigning them a level.
• Adjective grids. "Always / often / sometimes / never collaborative" measures the observer's impression. A behavioural descriptor -- "proposed a revision after listening to a classmate's objection" -- measures a fact.
• Assessment without feedback. A transversal competence assessed and not discussed with the student produces no development. The value is in the conversation that follows.

The link with subjects

None of these activities requires extra hours: they are ways of running tasks you set anyway. It is the same logic that applies to GreenComp and to the digital competence areas of DigComp: a transversal competence is not taught separately, it is made visible inside subject work.

Explore the 3 areas, 9 competences and 27 descriptors on the LifeComp portal at ExplorerHub.