Overview

Competence is the ultimate goal of education, teaching, and training. Competence is the expression of ability and skill, not only concerned with the provision of information, the acquisition of knowledge, and the development of wisdom. Increasingly, education, teaching, and training are undertaken with technology support, particularly through the Web, the internet, and institutional intranets. The principled design and construction of effective technology support requires new approaches to appropriate models, views, and structures of learning and teaching. In particular, assessment has shifted away from content-based tests of information retention to competence-based tests of ability and skill, and away from summative tests of achievement to formative tests which support and enhance learning. This book presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an ontological approach to adaptive assessment and the automatic generation of questions from a competency model. Examples of applying the competence model are described, and experiments are reported that demonstrate the generation and adaptive sequencing of assessments.