Competency-Based Education
Competency-Based Education (CBE) is an instructional approach that prioritizes the acquisition of specific skills and practical expertise over traditional educational models that often focus on broader knowledge. In CBE, students progress through a curriculum by mastering discrete competencies, which are individual tasks required to achieve a broader goal. This method is particularly effective in vocational training, allowing students to learn at their own pace and to demonstrate proficiency in each task before moving on.
Assessment in CBE differs from traditional summative assessments, instead using a credentialing system where students earn recognition for each mastered competency. This personalized learning experience benefits non-traditional students, such as those balancing work and family responsibilities, by allowing them to bypass content they already understand. While CBE can enhance flexibility and relevance in education, it also raises concerns about the need for effective self-motivation and the quality of instructional support, especially in self-paced environments. Critics argue that CBE may overlook the value of revisiting material from multiple perspectives, which can deepen understanding. Overall, CBE has gained traction as a pragmatic response to the evolving demands of higher education and workforce readiness.
Competency-Based Education
Abstract
Competency-based education is a method of instruction that focuses not on abstract thinking or the development of general knowledge, but on specific skills and practical forms of expertise. It is concerned with students acquiring mastery over each stage of a process, and is most often employed when the topic of study is vocational in nature. The competencies are the individual tasks that must be combined together in order to accomplish a broader goal. Students study one competency at a time, only moving on to the next one when they have mastered it.
Overview
Competency-based education is used when the information being studied can be broken down into discrete tasks or sections, each of which may be studied in isolation from the others. An example might be the operation of a large piece of potentially dangerous equipment, such as a semi-truck. This skill may be broken down into smaller tasks, such as putting the vehicle in gear and driving, learning to put the truck into reverse and back it up, vehicle repair and maintenance, and so forth. All of the tasks must be learned before one becomes a certified truck driver, but for the most part the tasks can be learned in any order. Maintenance can come before driving, for example. The modular nature of competency-based education is especially advantageous when students enter a program of study having already mastered, or partially mastered, some parts of the topic. They are able to gloss over the modules that they are familiar with, and spend more time focusing on the parts they find difficult (Hylton, Manit & Messick-Svare, 2017).
Competency-based education tends to use a form of assessment that is different from the summative assessment customary with traditional education. In summative assessments, a student receives a grade that is intended to reflect their overall performance in the course. The difficulty with this is that it is not clear if the grade earned applies to each and every different part of the course, or if it applies only to some parts and not to others. For example, if a student receives a grade of 85% in a history course that requires term papers, presentations, written exams, and regular attendance, it could be that the student scored 85% in each of these areas, or it could be that the student scored much higher in one or two areas and much lower in others (i.e., the grade of 85% could be an average). This type of assessment clearly would not be well suited to studies that use competency-based instruction, where the goal is for students to show mastery of every part of the curriculum. One would not want to have a situation where a student studying truck driving graduates with a 70% because she scored 100% on truck maintenance but only 50% on truck driving (Dragoo & Barrows, 2016).
Instead of relying on summative assessments in this fashion, competency-based education more often uses a credential system. Each time a task is mastered, the student acquires a credential that is specific to that task. Once a student is credentialed in all of a program's tasks, the student can be certified as having completed the course of study. If there are parts of the program that a student is especially gifted at, then the student can avoid spending time studying for that credential by simply performing that task's assessment successfully, and then moving on to another task (Sanders, 2015). Competency-based assessment is thus very well suited to situations in which safety is an issue, because it allows students to progress gradually through multiple levels of mastery, ensuring that they are prepared for each new challenge.
Further Insights
Proponents of competency-based education often mention that it is beneficial in part because it lends itself naturally to a greater degree of personalization than more traditional methods of education. In a traditional classroom based on summative assessment, the instructor delivers information to the students in a large group, through lectures and demonstrations. This has long been seen as an efficient way of doing things, because it allows a single instructor to communicate the curriculum to many students at once, yet this can sometimes be a drawback as well. This is because the one-to-many approach of traditional instruction is built upon two major assumptions which have largely been disproved: the assumption that all students learn a given set of material in the same way, and the assumption that they all will learn it at the same pace. This may have made sense many years ago, when education was viewed as an extension of the assembly line approach used in manufacturing facilities, but decades of research and practice have shown that learning is more successful when it addresses the unique needs of each individual (Grus et al., 2016).
Competency-based education does this almost by default. As noted previously, it divides the curriculum into distinct tasks or competencies, each of which must be mastered. It is then left to students to determine what order to address these competencies in, and how much time is needed for each. Students, therefore, create their own customized curricular pathways without even realizing what they are doing. One student might need to spend only a week reviewing the conversion of fractions to decimals, while other students might require two weeks or a month. All of these students will be given the time they need to mastery the concepts included in the fraction conversion competency (Ordonez, 2014).
Non-traditional students have found competency-based education particularly appealing. These are students who do not fit the typical profile of the college student, which is a person in their late teens or early twenties, without children and taking classes full time. Non-traditional students tend to be older and may have children and jobs in addition to attending classes. These students must balance many different responsibilities and may not be able to afford to invest time or money on classes that do not provide them with a direct benefit.
Non-traditional students usually have a significant amount of life experience, meaning that at least some of their classes are likely to cover content with which they are already familiar. This can be very frustrating, causing them to feel that they are taking time away from their children or work and paying tuition to attend a course where they are taught things that they already know. Competency-based education turns this model on its head in a way that is ideal for non-traditional students, because instead of sitting through a semester-long course full of information that they learned long ago in their professional lives, they can simply demonstrate their competency by taking an assessment and earning a passing grade. This allows non-traditional students to directly benefit from their life experience by using it to skip over instruction that for them would be superfluous (Nodine & Johnstone, 2015).
Some competency-based programs take this convenience and personalization still further, by designing their courses to be entirely self-paced. Under this approach, students acquire the study materials for a course and then begin the course whenever is convenient for them, whether this is the same day or six months later. After starting their studies, students proceed at whatever pace they find most comfortable and sustainable.
Some students will try to power through as quickly as they can, while others choose a more leisurely pace to make sure that they give themselves time to fully master the material. Either way, once the students feel they are ready, they take a course assessment to determine whether they have mastered the course's competencies. If they have, then they earn the credits for the course and they are ready to move on to their next class. If they do not pass the exam, they return to their studies until they are ready to try again.
Supporters of this type of course structure praise its flexibility and convenience, while critics point out that many students find it difficult to keep themselves on track when they do not have the formal structures and interactions of a traditional class to encourage them to keep working diligently (Simonds, Behrens & Holzbauer, 2017). For these students, the hardest part of the course may be finding ways to motivate themselves to put in the necessary time.
Critics also point out that many schools offering self-paced learning programs are less than reputable, and many choose this type of course delivery not for its pedagogical advantages, but because it is has a high profit margin (Oyugi, 2015). Traditional courses require an institution to pay an instructor to deliver the course content, but self-paced, competency-based courses have almost no overhead. There is no instructor needing to be paid, and no classroom or campus needing to be maintained. Students pay for their materials and pay examination fees in order to earn credits, so once the course is designed and the textbooks selected, all that remains is to collect students' payments. Interestingly, many traditional schools have begun to offer competency-based programs in addition to their traditional degree pathways, in part because of their potential for generating revenue with very little investment.
Poor performance and dropout rates associated with programs that rely entirely on self-motivation are not the only criticisms leveled at competency-based education in a self-paced environment. Another concern is that this approach tends to ignore the fact that teaching is an actual set of skills that not everyone possesses to the same degree, and this becomes painfully evident when one must teach oneself. Part of the value of education can be to have access to an instructor who thoroughly understands the subject and from whom one can receive guidance in order to better understand the course material. It is all too common for students to believe that they are making progress, only to fail their competency assessments. This can lead to frustration or even to the student giving up.
Care must also be used in assuring that competency-based education is used only in situations where its benefits can offer optimal results for learners, such as in many areas of vocational training. Where abstract thinking is required or in more theory-based disciplines, a more flexible and responsive model of instruction is widely thought to be essential. Some have also raised the possibility that competency-based education, insofar as it encourages students to gloss over content areas they are comfortable with, may miss some opportunities to foster a deeper understanding of those topics, as might occur if the student were required to study them again despite their familiarity. This argument asserts that students may benefit from studying the same topics multiple times, from different instructors, because this will help them to see the information from multiple perspectives. While this makes sense in principle, in practice it is unlikely to attract many students, given their natural desire to complete their education expeditiously.
Issues
Competency-based education has emerged as a potential response to the debate over the utility of higher education. Many millennials have graduated from their undergraduate and graduate programs only to encounter difficulty finding jobs that pay well enough to allow them to maintain an adequate standard of living and repay their student loans. In light of this, the question has arisen of whether the college degree, in its traditional form, is still a sensible option.
Traditional higher education is based on the concept of earning credit hours and accumulating them until enough have been received to satisfy the requirements of a degree. Credit hours are rough measures of how many hours per week a student must attend a course. The concept of the credit hour was not originally intended as a means of measuring the learning of students; rather, it was first developed as a way to measure the workload of instructors in order to determine compensation rates.
Critics charge that as long as a student accumulates enough credit hours, the nature of the individual courses is less relevant, leading to situations in which, for example, a course in motion picture Westerns might count toward one's required number of credit hours in the discipline of history. Skeptics contend that higher education has become removed from the practical needs of everyday life, and that it is little more than an intellectual exercise designed to saddle young people with large amounts of student loan debt (Burnette, 2016).
These concerns have contributed to the emergence of competency-based education as a more sensible alternative to a traditional university degree. Instead of earning credit hours toward a degree, competency-based education requires students to master specific skills, giving the appearance that the education received is a better value for the money it costs. In traditional education, what is being measured is how much time a student has devoted to a course of education, while in competency-based education the focus is on skills that have been acquired and tested to verify mastery.
To put the difference another way, if a graduate of a traditional degree program is asked what he or she has learned, the answer will likely include general skills such as writing, critical thinking, and time management; whereas, if a graduate of a competency-based program is asked the same question, it will be straightforward for the student to list the various skills that have been acquired. When this sense of clarity is combined with the greater sense of self-actualization felt by students in competency-based education, it is easy to understand why the approach has gained popularity so rapidly (Sullivan & Downey, 2015).
Terms & Concepts
Abstract Learning: Learning that involves the comprehension and manipulation of ideas without tangible reference points to aid understanding, such as higher mathematics, literature, philosophy, and so forth.
Credit Hour: A unit of study measuring the amount of work required by a course in order to successfully complete it. In higher education, credit hours must be accumulated in order to earn a degree.
Learning Domain: A field of study in which competency-based education occurs. The broadest learning domains are typically described as affective, cognitive, and psychomotor.
Personalization: A significant feature of competency-based education is the degree to which it can be personalized, that is, tailored to the specific needs of an individual rather than offering a "one size fits all" approach.
Summative Assessment: An assessment method in which the student is assessed against an entire body of knowledge rather than on a particular competency. Traditional assessments such as midterms and final exams are summative.
Vocational Education: Education that is designed to prepare students for the requirements of a non-professional occupation, such as mechanic or manufacturing.
Bibliography
Burnette, D. M. (2016). The renewal of competency-based education: A review of the literature. Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 64(2), 84–93. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116268289&site=ehost-live
Dragoo, A., & Barrows, R. (2016). Implementing competency-based education: Challenges, strategies, and a decision-making framework. Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 64(2), 73–83. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=116268285&site=ehost-live
Grus, C. L., Falender, C., Fouad, N. A., & Lavelle, A. K. (2016). A culture of competence: A survey of implementation of competency-based education and assessment. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 10(4), 198–205. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=120389772&site=ehost-live
Hylton, M. E., Manit, J., & Messick-Svare, G. (2017). Gatekeeping and competency-based education: Developing behaviorally specific remediation policies. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 37(3), 249–259. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=123325576&site=ehost-live
Nodine, T., & Johnstone, S. M. (2015). Competency-based education: Leadership challenges. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 47(4), 61–66. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=108696645&site=ehost-live
Ordonez, B. (2014). Competency-based education: Changing the traditional college degree power, policy, and practice. New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development, 26(4), 47–53. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=99124327&site=ehost-live
Oyugi, J. L. (2015). Rational and challenges of competency-based education and training: The "wickedness" of the problem. Journal of Education and Practice, 6(14), 74–78.
Sanders, C. (2015). Competency-based education programs: A library perspective. Public Services Quarterly, 11(2), 151–162. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=103168036&site=ehost-live
Simonds, J., Behrens, E., & Holzbauer, J. (2017). Competency-based education in a traditional higher education setting: A case study of an introduction to psychology course. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education, 29(2), 412–428. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=123448137&site=ehost-live
Sullivan, S. C., & Downey, J. A. (2015). Shifting educational paradigms: From traditional to competency-based education for diverse learners. American Secondary Education, 43(3), 4–19. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=108991086&site=ehost-live
Suggested Reading
Brodersen, R. M., Randel, B. (2017). Measuring student progress and teachers' assessment of student knowledge in a competency-based education System. (REL 2017–238). Washington, D.C.: U. S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Central & Marzano Research.
Brodersen, R. M., Yanoski, D., Mason, K., Apthorp, H., Piscatelli, J. (2017). Overview of selected state policies and supports related to k-12 competency-based education. (REL 2017–249). Washington, D.C.: U. S. Department of Education, Regional Educational Laboratory Central, & Marzano Research.
Gallagher, C. W. (2014). Disrupting the game-changer: Remembering the history of competency-based education. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 46(6), 16–23. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=99907624&site=ehost-live
Ryan, S., & Cox, J. D. (2017). Investigating student exposure to competency-based education. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(24). Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=122000180&site=ehost-live
Ten Cate, O. (2015). The false dichotomy of quality and quantity in the discourse around assessment in competency-based education. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 20(3), 835–838. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=120361802&site=ehost-live