Competency-Based Education

An overview of competency-based education

During the past three of four decades, teaching concepts in the domain primary education have been in a stage of constant evolution. Earlier, a majority of teaching methods centered on on disseminating available knowledge from teachers to the students. The perceived dominance of “knowledge diffusion” continued for many years where the role of teachers as main facilitators of learning took center stage. However, advent of new approaches to teaching saw a significant change in the paradigm of education. The hitherto “knowledge diffusion” method of teaching was slowly replaced by new methods like “process oriented” and “competency-based” education (CBE) that depended on special teaching methodologies.

For years, colleges and universities have been using the concept of competency-base education as a part of the curriculum. In essence, they have assigned credit points for course content a student has studied and mastered before through different learning tasks and assignments. In addition, both universities and colleges have designed alternative approaches to competency-based education too. Another approach to CBE, where students are given credit as they learn and master new course content, is also being used and explored in an academic

(2013) reported that competency-based educational framework draws heavily from key concepts mastered from Bloom’s Taxonomy and Essential Schools-standards based architecture. In other words, the CBE is an amalgamation of earlier classical version of educational standards, and it represents a neo-classical approach to a seemingly crippled educational system of the day. With the student acting as the fulcrum of a highly personalized learning experience, competency-based education’s origin could be tracked down through years of modernism introduced by academicians and school leaders. According to Freeland (2014), the term competency education or competency-based education follows the chart laid down by two landmark policies: New Hampshire’s policy and International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL).

In a related development, CompetencyWorks, a brainchild of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL) and MetisNet, developed a five-piece practical definition of high caliber competency-based education (Sturgis, Patrick & Pittenger, 2011). The working partnership known as “CompetencyWorks” depicts competency-based education as a tool in which:

a) Students follow an organized approach to demonstrate