July 2007 Volume 10 Number 3 - Educational Technology & Society

For any generic skill, it is possible to add performance indicators such as frequency, scope, autonomy, complexity
and/or context of the use. For example, a competency like “diagnose the source of malfunction of a car engine” could
be made more precise by adding at the end performance indicators such as “in all cases” or “in the majority of cases”
(frequency), “for part of the causes” or “for all causes” (scope), “without help” or “with little assistance”
(autonomy), “for high complexity engines” (complexity), or “in unfamiliar cases” (context of use). Some of these
values are shown in figure 7 as instances of the ontology. Other individuals and other values could be added to
extend the ontology. The usefulness of such indicators is to help build ways to assess the competency, for example,
to design exam questions or to register student actions in some model of his or her progress.
Table 6. Performance Categories or Levels vs. Other Indicators
Alternative and more simple performance indicators classify performance for a generic skill in four broad categories:
“awareness,” “familiarization,” “productivity,” or “expertise,” or simply by a number on a 1–10 scale for the
performance level. These categories or levels can be direct evaluation results, or they can be calculated from the
other indicators. One way to combine indicators or criteria to define performance classes or levels is shown in table
6.
Figure 8. Situating resources on a skills/performance scale
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