Some Thoughts on Competency-Based Training and Education

 

Bob Jensen at Trinity University

 

No short definition embraces all aspects of the concept of competency-based learning.  Several of the key components are as follows:

 

  • Active rather than passive learning 
    For example, the traditional pedagogy of lecturing students, making them memorize textbook passages, and testing upon what is in the lectures and textbooks is largely a passive learning pedagogy.  An active pedagogy makes students learn-to-learn in the sense that they must instead take greater responsibility for what they learn, where they find that they learn, and how they deal with on-the-job experience and research.  Active learning has some key metacognitive advantages with respect to long-term memory --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm


  • Integrative Learning
    Integrative learning in a competency-based process cuts across subject matter that traditionally has been decentralized into virtually isolated models.  For example, instead of having isolated modules on financial reporting, tax, and ethics, integrative learning in theory merges these topics into combined modules.


  • Critical Thinking
    Especially in passive learning, students have become accustomed to accepting their lecture notes and their textbook passages as “truth.”  Critical thinking in either active or passive learning entails critically thinking about what is being learned and challenging key points with added reflection and research.  In accounting it is especially common for students to simply learn a standard or procedure without critically challenging the appropriateness of this standard or procedure in varying contexts.  Competency-based learning ideally rewards critical thinking at each step of the way, including on-the-job experience.


  • Repetitions of tasks that reinforce prior learning
    Traditional learning typically contains a succession of courses or modules where students master one module and move on to the next.  Competency-based learning should instead have content repetitions that ideally take place in varying circumstances that reinforce earlier learning.


  • Expert assessment of total competency apart from mastery of isolated components
    The most difficult aspect of competency-based learning lies in deciding what level of competency has been achieved.  One problem is that competency is often only tested on one or a few sets of specific circumstances.  High achievers in one set of circumstances are not always competent when circumstances are varied.  For example, and outstanding pilot when an aircraft is in perfect condition may not be competent when the hydraulics fail.


  • Lifelong training and learning
    Competency-based learning takes it for granted that competency is not a threshold that is achieved by a single point in time.  Rather it is a life-long demonstration of continuous expansion and renewal in which nobody is ever totally competent, but some are more competent than others and even the most competent must continuously strive to get better and better.

 

 

 

The Ideal Competency-Based Model:  Medical Residency Programs
Probably the best example of competency-based learning takes place in medical residency programs where medical doctors expand their competencies into specialties such as neurosurgery, ophthalmology, psychiatry, etc.  The learning is active rather than passive.  The learning is integrative and reinforcing since dealing with patients reinforces prior learning in medical school.  And competency is based upon expert assessment of skills apart from written examinations.  Feedback from mentors, peers, nurses, technicians, and even patients themselves plays a far greater role in assessing competence than certification examinations.  The incompetent are weeded out before becoming eligible to even take the certification examinations.

 

The attributes of competency-based approaches to education are listed as follows on Page 7 of “Competency Models for Accounting Professionals,” by J.E. Boritz and C.A. Carnaghan at the University of Waterloo:

 

Our preceding discussion gives a sense of what competencies are, and how competency requirements are determined and assessed. When these various aspects of competencies are brought together and applied in an educational context, the result can be referred to as a "competency-based education program."  According to the U.S.-based National Consortium of Competency-Based Education Centers, a number of criteria define such programs (Burke et al., 1975; Wolf, 1995), including:

  • Competencies are based on analysis of occupational roles or a theoretical formulation of occupational responsibilities. Put another way, most competency-based educational approaches have attempted to define successful performance in a particular occupation rather than success in a broader educational or societal context (Kearney, 1994; Wolf, 1995).
  • Competency statements or maps describe outcomes expected from the performance of professionally related functions, or those skills and attitudes thought to be essential to the performance of those functions (as opposed to inputs such as information or knowledge).[1] This implies that competency is determined by the person’s ability to achieve the specified outcomes, not the length of time spent in any program or institution. One implication of this is that completion of or enrollment in any particular program may not be required; instead, the focus is on demonstration of competence as acquired through whatever means the learner has chosen.
  • Competency statements facilitate criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced assessment; in other words, whether the person can achieve the specified outcomes, not his or her performance relative to others[2]. This also usually means that students are assessed in a binary manner, as either "competent" or "not competent."
  • Competencies are treated as tentative predictors of professional effectiveness, and are subject to continual validation. This implies that competency assessments should preferably be done either in the work environment or in a context that simulates the work environment.
  • Competencies are specified and made public prior to instruction.
  • The instructional program is derived from and linked to specified competencies.
  • Instruction that supports competency development is organized into units of manageable size.
  • Instruction is organized and implemented so as to accommodate learner style, sequence preference, pacing, and perceived needs.
  • Learner progress is determined by demonstrated competence.
  • The extent of the learner’s progress is made known to him or her throughout the program.

 

The criteria listed above describe how to define, disseminate, instruct, assess and evolve competencies. It is not clear whether it is possible to take only a few of these elements and still characterize the approach as being competency-based education. But, as we will describe in this paper, there are few, if any, examples of a complete implementation of this list of requirements and even fewer examples of clear success, particularly in professional education and accreditation.

 

 

 

 

 


[1] This approach to competencies is also often referred to as a "behaviorist" approach. While later writers such as Hager et al. (1994) suggest that this view of competency is discredited, other writers cited in Kerka (1998) state it is the most influential, and thus is the one referred to here.

[2] Competency-based approaches, as originally conceived, went somewhat beyond this and required that all of the specified outcomes be achieved for a candidate to be viewed as competent.