Teachers’ difficulties to plan, coordinate and evaluate key competencies. An analysis from the education inspection

Abstract

This article presents a research in which we analyse the difficulties of teachers to plan, coordinate, and assess key competencies in a sample of 23 schools. The issue has profound implications since a bad educational practice of key competencies may infringe one of the fundamental rights of students to be evaluated objectively (LODE: Art.6b and RD 732/1995: Art. 13.1) and to overcome the assessment tests deemed necessary to obtain the minimum academic degree awarded by the Spanish state. The research has been developed from a double methodological perspective. First, it is a descriptive research where we present the main characteristics of key competencies and the basic rules for its development and evaluation. Second, a qualitative analysis with a twofold approach is applied through the use of the ATLAS.ti computer program software and the reticular, category based social network analysis with UCINET and the yED Graph Editor application in order to analyse the main difficulties and obstacles. Results show that there are serious difficulties in the three analysed dimensions: "planning", "coordination" and "assessment" of key competences. More teacher training, better assessment procedures, the development of more active and functional methodologies and fostering internal coordination processes in schools, are all required measures.