Competency Based Education and Training

Can competence and knowledge mix? 37
Another way of putting this is to say that, whenever we learn something specific, we also
learn something general. It is also why our brilliant offspring, having learned to identify
dogs at an unparalleled early age, then insist—often very vigorously—that pigs and cows
are ‘dogs’ as well.
The point of this brief excursion into cognitive theory is to demonstrate that the sort of
knowledge required for vocational learning or ‘competence’ is not in some way different
from that learned in other parts of life, or education. Conversely, one cannot say that
some sorts of knowledge are generically unsuitable for competency-based learning.
People may need to grasp more or fewer general principles, or deal with a wider or
narrower set of applications: but any sort of knowledge involves general schemata of
some sort. What we have here is a spectrum, not a dichotomy between general cognitive
skills (learned in ‘education’?) and narrow vocationally relevant ‘facts’ (learned in
‘training’?).
The case of the child learning to categorise also highlights another very important
point. It is that a great deal of knowledge—including abstract, generalisable knowledge—
is acquired through experience, just as much as ‘skills’ are. Michael Eraut has discussed
the issue in detail on a number of occasions (e.g., Eraut, 1985). What is important is to
emphasise, again, that we do not have a dichotomy between compe-tencies (or
knowledge) which are, or are not, appropriately acquired ‘on the job’, but simply
variations of degree. (‘On the job’ in this context should be read as including authentic
simulations and applied tasks). It is also important to remember that ‘practical
experience’ does not mean getting your hands dirty. 5 Competency based learning has
been bedevilled by the idea that it only works for manual skills: but experience is just as
relevant, and just as practical, when concerned with predominantly cognitive activities.
School-based subjects also suffer from this curious misperception. In maths GCSE
investigations, ‘practical’ has become equated with making models.
Recognising knowledge requirements
I stressed above that, if you are devising measures for a construct, you had better be fairly
clear about what that construct is. In this case, the knowledge which goes to make up an
occupational competence is unlikely to be ‘just factual’. You certainly need facts. They
are the skeleton of the sort of structures Messick is discussing: the basis on which,
whether involved in clinical diagnosis or saving curdled mayonnaise, one selects a subset
of possible hypotheses to ‘test’ or act on. 6 That is why, for example, all the research on
clinical reasoning (e.g., Elstein et al., 1978; Arkes and Hammond, 1987; Forsythe et al.,
1986) finds information a necessary condition of competence. Equally, however, tests
that measure only factual recall are inadequate measures of knowledge and unlikely to
provide much evidence of occupational competence. Eraut (1985) makes similar points
about ‘professional’ knowledge.
Suppose we take as an example an occupation in which I have been assured that there
is ‘very little knowledge base’, namely, catering: and use, as a specific case, baking.
Actually, I think there is a very great deal of knowledge involved in baking, although
much of it may never be made explicit. It follows that if we measure competence in
baking—directly and via outputs, or more indirectly, via its component parts—then we
are going to have to measure quite a lot of ‘knowledge and understanding’.