Purpose: Sustainable development requires multiple stakeholders to work and learn across practices, in other words, it requires boundary crossing competence. To prepare students for their future sustainability professions, higher education should facilitate the development of boundary crossing competence in its curricula. This study aims to…

Developing and assessing individuals' competence to identify business opportunities is of increasing importance in the current widespread introduction of entrepreneurship programmes in higher education worldwide. However, performance tests to assess opportunity identification competence (OIC) are scarce in the entrepreneurship education…

Purpose: To present a description of recent developments in the Dutch green educational system (agriculture, living environment, food). The article builds on a previous 2006 contribution to "JAEE" where different scenarios for changes in green education were suggested. Design/methodology/approach: An analysis of policy documents from…

Present-day students are expected to be lifelong learners throughout their working life. Higher education must therefore prepare students to self-direct their learning beyond formal education, in real-life working settings. This can be achieved in so-called hybrid learning configurations in which working and learning are integrated. In such a…

Inquiry-based science education is an important innovation. Researchers and teachers consider it to be stimulating for pupils' application of research skills, construction of meaning and acquiring scientific knowledge. However, there is ambiguity as to what competencies are required to teach inquiry-based science. Our purpose is to develop a…

An important assumption of entrepreneurial competence is that (at least part of) it can be learned and developed. However, human resources development (HRD) practices aimed at further strengthening and developing small-business owner-managers' entrepreneurial competence are complex and underdeveloped. A multisource assessment of owner-managers'…

Competence-based education is becoming increasingly popular. Competencies are used more and more as the starting point for designing curricula and instructional methods, especially in vocational education and training, to realize authentic and self-steering study programmes. Despite its popularity in both research and educational settings, there…

Creating competence has become a major issue in organizations. Various authors contend that competency management has the potential of integrating organizational strategy, human-resource instruments, and human-resource development; that competency development can lead to performance improvement; and that it can help Human Resource Development…

This contribution reviews how four European countries--England, Germany, France and the Netherlands--use the concept of competence in the process of developing vocational education and training. Competence in England is set in the context of the National Vocational Qualifications; in Germany within action competence and the approach to learning…

The concept of competence is increasingly the basis for (re)designing VET. In competence-based VET academic disciplines are no longer starting points for curriculum development. Competence needed for working in practice, however, is. Competence-based learning is a dominant trend in VET in several countries because of fewer expected problems in the…

Agricultural education has been an essential factor in the success of agricultural development in the Netherlands. At present, as in many countries throughout the world, the position of agricultural education is threatened. Does agricultural education have a future in the Netherlands, and if so, what strategies are being used for its survive? This…