In April 2013, "NEJHE" launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. In this installment, DiSalvio interviews Pamela Tate, president and CEO of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL). Topics…

Focusing on the challenges of training counseling psychologists, Ridley and colleagues offer in this issue a review and critique of microskills training, the dominant training model in counseling psychology graduate programs. Recognizing the role of higher order cognitive and affective functions in expert practice, they propose a hierarchical…

Western Governors University was conceptualized in 1995 at a meeting of the Western Governors Association, and founded soon after in an effort to increase degree production in higher education at a lower cost. It has expanded significantly over the past few years, driven both by increased demand for online education and by drastic state budget…

In this essay, John F. Ebersole describes how, during his tours of the higher education conference circuit throughout the spring of 2013, as both a participant and observer, he came away with a good sense of the issues occupying the attention of American higher education during this period. Ebersole shares ten of the most common themes and…

Discusses the definition of competency, how to select competencies, competency analysis, how to identify competencies, and the changing role of human resource development. (JOW)

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…

Although postmodernism suggests multiple realities, the predominant view of workplace learning is that realities are explainable in terms of competency-based standards, uniform syllabi, and narrow beliefs about how learning should be managed and measured. These practices are linked with image, market share, power, and control in enterprises. (SK)

Analyzes "competence" as it pertains to teaching to clarify the term. Four normative conceptions of the meaning of competence that result from the analysis are identified. Implications for teaching and educational settings are explored. (DF)

The narrowly behavioristic model used by the competence movement is part of a New Right process of culture change aimed at displacing the prevailing professional ethic and culture. The competency method oversimplifies the nature of organizations and work as well as social relations. (SK)

Competency-based education (CBE) has moved from observing task performance to the cognitive structures underlying performance. This appropriation of cognitive psychology has not reconciled differences in definitions of competence. Instead, it is used to explain the purposes of CBE in meeting the needs of industry, supplanting any other values that…

The competency movement, or "the cult of competency," is critiqued in this paper, which argues that the movement is less concerned with the complex facets of competence than it is with a technology of specific knowledge and application. Educational institutions have several message systems through which objectives can be achieved:…

This critique of competency-based education discusses competencies in relation to excessive reductionism, behavioral psychology, determinism, bureaucratization, serial thinking, and the industrial-commercial nexus. The author shows that competency-based systems assume the existence of a social reality that is, however, an artificial extrapolation…

Competence has varied meanings in everyday, academic, and vocational contexts. The normative positions of competency-based training and cognitive psychology have gone through various cycles. Reconciliation of differences depends on acknowledgment of the normative nature of competence and recognition of the context for advocacy of a particular…

Competency standards can hinder vocational education by being confused with curriculum documents, by being used too early in the teaching process, and by being used to assess superficial aspects of occupations. Standards can help when competence is conceptualized in an integrated approach that is used to guide curriculum development, teaching, and…

Competency-based training is not a singular model; it embeds radically different conceptions of competence, depending on whether delivery and assessment of training incorporate industry standards. Models that maintain a tension between the outcomes and processes of education and training, rather than a focus solely on outcomes, are most…