Transversal competences define and target knowledge that every human being should develop in school in order to understand the complexity of situations in normal life and act intelligently. However, without anchoring them in concrete situations, the course of development of these competences and their assessment seem to stay rather vague. After defining the concept of competence and sketching the guidelines of competence assessment, the article illustrates the difficulty of influencing critical learning inherent in transversal competence and the necessity of evaluating it. The last part of the article makes suggestions for professionalisation of this activity.

The term “evaluating written language” hides underlying polysemic concepts that this article aims at clarifying from the start. Therefore both the certifying and the formative evaluation of written production will be addressed. The former is doubly institutional: its aim is to give an orientation and a planification of learning writing skills, and also constitutes the basis of the final decision of success or failure. The latter, widely claimed but less widely applied, aims to improve the  learning of the skill during the learning, and is based on diagnostic concepts, and, in coherence with those, on the setting up of permanent actions allowing learners to progress in their learning. These aspects will be illustrated by concrete examples.

Many points of convergence or genuine similarities are commonly identified between the fields of health and education. More specifically, this paper aims to examine the hypothesis that there is a significant analogy between clinical medical reasoning and formative learning assessment. From basic definitions, the authors first examine how clinical reasoning and formative learning assessment are two clinical approaches, highlighting the epistemological tensions they share. Then, through comparative approach, they analyse successively similarities or distinctions between the two activities, with respect to several attributes, including objects, processes and postures they imply. Analyses mainly refer to the clinical reasoning of doctors and formative assessment is particularly considered in the context of formative supervision in the clinical training context.