The word competence or ‘competency’ has conventionally been used to describe a professional or occupational trait meant to be a mix between behaviours and skills. Generally, competencies are measures of how well one can do certain things, taking into consideration her/his knowledge, skills and attributes. Competencies are generally behaviours that are easily identified and measured. For example, a driver should be competent in driving, a physician must be competent in diagnosing disease and prescribing medicines (for the patients), a nurse should be competent in serving the patients, a teacher must be competent in teaching and so on.
To make professionals competent, ‘competency-based’ curriculum is developed for specific profession or occupation such as driving, medicine, nursing, teaching, etc. Mastery learning (i.e., attaining the skill in totality) is a basic feature of competency. This mode of curriculum development has so far not been found suitable for general education, especially in primary and secondary levels because young learners need to develop most of the objectives of education in all the three domains (viz., cognitive, affective and psychomotor) developed by Benjamin Samuel Bloom (an American educational psychologist) and his co-workers in 1956 brainstorming together for about four years (since 1953). Since the curricula in higher education generally aim at developing expertise in some particular disciplines, these can be said to be competency-based.
However, a movement for making school education competency-based started in late 1990s within Europe to cater with high rates of unemployment in the late 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, that economic crisis led the emergence of policy discourse on competences in France, the European Union, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD has become the most influential international organization in the domain of education since it developed the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 1997). In 1995, two years before it launched formal planning for PISA, the OECD explored the notion of competence in a report that compared educational standards used in 10 OECD member nations. The report equated ‘competence’ with ‘skills’ made specific references to employers’ needs and graduates’ capabilities for employment.
Almost simultaneously, French economist Jacques Delors prepared and submitted a report entitled “Learning: The Treasure Within” to the UNESCO (1996). This report emphasized “learning throughout life” and identified ‘four pillars’ of education: viz., 1) learning to know, 2) learning to do, 3) learning to be and 4) learning to live together. In the context of ‘learning to do’, it discussed a shift from ‘skill’ to ‘competence’, thus apparently defining competence more broadly than the OECD’s 1995 report. The French community of Belgium introduced such ‘redefined’ competences into its primary and lower secondary curriculum in late 1990s and the wave of competency-based curriculum-making reached the Francophone countries of Africa, especially in western Africa. The OECD’s financing the education in poor African countries was also an impetus for adopting the newly crafted ‘competency-based’ school curriculum.
However, recently describing ‘competences’ as expanding and refining the idea of objectives are being accepted and tried to adopt in many countries. The Asia Society coined the term “21st Century Competencies” and many Asian countries like China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong are trying to adopt competency- based education by reforming the school curricula. In the Americas, the term “Competency Works” is used like a slogan. A brief discussion on learning theories and curriculum development is needed before elaborating on how the term ‘competency’ is now redefined. There have been three main theories on the learning process, viz., behaviourist, cognitive and constructivist ones. As behaviourism takes people as passive individuals who just respond to the external stimuli, no curriculum was developed based on this notion. Cognitive theories recognize human beings’ externally ‘unseen’ thinking process inside the head and believe that learners are actively involved in the learning process. Constructivist theories are actually advanced types of cognitive theories that speak not only of the people’s understanding and processing of the information gathered but also that the people can construct their own individual meanings, and meanings of facts may also be constructed by groups of people interacting with each other (social constructivism; Vygotsky, 1978).
The first attempt in curriculum-making was based on the cognitive theory and was aimed at choosing some subject matters or contents of specific disciplines as the sources of knowledge. It was thought that once the knowledge is acquired, the people would be able to understand matters and do works necessary for them. That curriculum was said to be content or discipline-based. However, worthwhile curriculum-making process begins with deciding first on what the learners will be and what they will achieve by learning any subject or discipline. Thus, the objective-based curriculum models were developed starting from the mid-1950s (e.g., Ralph Tyler, 1949). After publication of Bloom’s (1956) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, the ‘objective-based’ curriculum-making process was better shaped by Hilda Taba (1962). Thus, more specific objectives termed ‘learning outcomes’ (as easily observable, measurable and thus assessable) were developed; hence the term ‘outcome-based’ has been used for this mode of curriculum-making.
To make school curriculum competency-based, the meaning of ‘competency’ was expanded and described as explicit, measurable and transferable objectives. Such a definition, however, keeps competency as similar to ‘learning outcomes’ and does not contain all objectives of education. But when competency includes application, problem solving, critical thinking (analysis), creative thinking (synthesis and creation of knowledge), along with the development of important (psychomotor) skills and dispositions, adding also communication and ‘social skills’ (a mix of cognitive and affective objectives), as well as attitudes, ‘competency’ becomes equal to all educational ‘objectives’ described under the three domains.
Personalized’ learning, inclusive of the diversity in capability and individual needs of all learners is added to the purview of ‘competence’; this establishes equity as envisaged in SDG-4 (having similarity with US “No Child Left Behind” Act, 2001). Formative system of assessment is said to be an essential feature for making assessment ‘meaningful’ so that learners receives adequate amount of scaffolding based on their progress in learning. Since ‘mastery learning’ component of earlier defined ‘professional competency’ retains, ‘time-based’ school curriculum transforms into ‘learning-based’ curriculum built upon learner-centered ‘active learning’ following constructivist theories. Inclusion of diverse needs and ‘mastery learning’ in redefined ‘competency’ are two components added even to all ‘objectives of education’ in the three domains (Although ‘mastery learning’ was also developed by Bloom in 1968, it was outside the three domains).
Such broadly defined ‘competency’ that can be called ‘Objectives Plus’, however, raises some questions. First question is on the inclusion of ‘attitude’ (i.e., affective domain) in it. Although Delors (1996) claimed that objectives of all domains can be integrated in ‘competency’ and be measured, no objective method of testing could have so far been developed to measure attitude and values; these can only be assessed by long-term observation of behaviour subjectively (that varies with observers). Another very pertinent question is: whether ‘mastery learning’ is possible for all learners (having diverse needs) in pre-university general education (‘Mastery’ can be achieved in professional competency courses by repeating as many times as required).
As meeting these challenges renders difficult, K.M.A. Levitt of the University of California expressed skepticism on the success of competency-based school curriculum in her online article “Global flows of competence-based approches in primary and secondary education” (https://journals.openedition.org/cres/3010). US ‘education standards’ still put much emphasis on contents and there prevails a set of ‘content standards’ in its K-12 (Kindergarten to Grade 12) curriculum. Australia uses the term ‘general capabilities’ in her F-10 (Foundation to Grade 10) curriculum and identifies eight learning areas (largely content areas in English, Mathematics, Science, Health and Physical Education, Humanities and Social Sciences, the Arts, Technologies and Languages.). The UK still uses the term ‘skill’ (not competency) in its ‘Key Stages’ (KS 1-4) school curriculum.
In Bangladesh, the primary curriculum was claimed to have made ‘competency-based’ in early 1990s (even before OECD countries)! However, defined both traditionally and now expanded, I find secondary curriculum of Bangladesh contains more competency items (though the term is not prominently used) than the primary one has. Following the worldwide wave, now Bangladesh must take the challenge (as Dr. Levitt put above) and try to make school curriculum truly competency-based.
The writer is an education researcher and a member of BCS
(General Education) Cadre.
Email: [email protected]