Skill/competency approaches to workplace-based policy seek to assess and train for discrete individual competencies with the goal of increasing employability and productivity. These approaches have become increasingly prominent across a range of advanced capitalist countries. A substantial critique has emerged over this same period regarding…

Immigrants will represent nearly 100 percent of net labour market growth in Canada by the year 2011. More than ever, employers recognize the need to effectively integrate immigrants into the workplace and they seek solutions to leverage the talents and contributions immigrants bring to the Canadian economy. From January to March 2009, Colleges…

Competency-based vocational education, focusing on occupational competencies, should be integrated into the curriculum for educating and training seafarers. (JOW)

An essential component of applied behavior analysis programs for teaching children with autism is discrete trials teaching. Experiment 1 investigated the effectiveness of a self-instructional manual for teaching university students to correctly apply discrete-trials teaching to teach three tasks to confederates role-playing children with autism.…

Discusses the implementation of competency-based education and the Developing a Curriculum process (DACUM) in Canada. Provides definitions of the processes and their impact on school administrators, faculty and staff, and students. (JOW)

Reviews competency-based models developed by the Ontario Society for Training and Development, American Society for Training and Development, Australia's National Training Board, and Britain's Training and Development Lead Body. Suggests an integrated approach that identifies knowledge, skills, and attributes underlying performance without rigid…

The skills and competencies considered key to participation in Australia's society and work force and the process used to identify them were examined against the backdrop of the development of New Zealand's essential skills and generic competency developments in England and Wales, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Germany. It was concluded…

A study identified the benefits and problem areas of competency-based vocational education (CBVE) and compared perceptions toward CBVE of 44 faculty, 5 administrators, and 236 students of the Cabot Institute of Applied Arts and Technology in Newfoundland. Academic faculty were more negative toward CBVE than any other group and students were…

Community college mechanics students in a competency-based program were compared with those in a cohort-based program. The cohort group perceived a split between theory and practice. The competency-based group was less affected by literacy and language difficulties. They felt success depended on motivation, initiative, and maturity; the cohort…

Describes one approach to individualized job preparation instruction, a performance-based training system designed to meet the needs of both trainee and employer. The system includes a performance profile of job elements, skills, and levels of competency which serves as a lifetime record of curricula and performance on each activity for a trainee.…

Presents a scheme for the development and implementation of an effective counseling program for manpower trainees and adults in similar programs. Describes a competency-based curriculum for the training of Canada Employment Centre (CEC) counselors developed by the Canada Employment and Immigration Commission. (JOW)

A five-step model for the implementation of competency-based education in Canada is proposed. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the curriculum, establishing where competency checks are most needed, developing policies and actual competency tests, and observing the impacts. (HLM)

Our department has redesigned its electrical and computer engineering programs by adopting a learning methodology based on competence development, problem solving, and the realization of design projects. In this article, we show how this pedagogical approach has been successfully used for learning probabilities and their application to computer…

Teacher and student dissatisfaction with a traditional approach to technical education has led one Canadian college to develop the ACT (Applied Civil Technology) Program, a self-learning system in which the student makes his own structure by scheduling the paths he desires to follow to reach the ultimate goal. (Author/AJ)

Final-year Ontario medical students (n=88) took a 4-station objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) using standardized patients and involving decisions to forgo life-sustaining treatment. Performance was scored on a checklist of behaviors unique to each case. Results indicated that because of low reliability, the OSCE is not a feasible…