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Reconceptualising Competency-based

Education and Training: with particular reference to education for occupations in Australia.

Andrew Gonczi

Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (by publication).

University of Technology, Sydney

August 1996

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CERTIFICATE

I certify that this thesis has not already been submitted for any degree and is not being submitted as part of

candidature for any other degree.

I also certify that the thesis has been written by me and that any help that I have received in preparing this thesis,

and all sources used, have been acknowledged in this thesis.

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CONTENTS

Linking Essay

Publication (a)- Gonczi, A., Hager, P. and Oliver, L. (1990). Establishing Competency-based Standards in the Professions. National Office of Overseas Skills Recognition. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service (pp 70).

Publication (b)- Hager, P. and Gonczi, A. (1991). Competency based standards: A boon for continuing professional education? Studies in Continuing Education, 13,1, 24-40.

Publication (c) - Gonczi, A., Hager, P. and Athanasou, J. (1993). The Development of Competencybased Assessment Strategies for the Professions. Canberra: DEET, Australian Government Publishing Service (pp 117).

Publication (d)- Scheeres, H., Gonczi, A., Hager, P. and Morley Warner, T. (1993). The Adult Basic Education Profession and Competence: Promoting Best Practice, Sydney: University of Technology, Sydney (pp 80).

Publication (e)- Hager, P. and Gonczi, A. (1993). Attributes and competence. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Vocational Education Research, 1, 1, 36-46.

Publication (f)- Hager, P., Gonczi, A. and Athanasou, J. (1994). General issues about the assessment of competence. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 19, 1, 3-16.

Publication (g) - Gonczi, A. (1994) Competency Based Assessment in the Professions in Australia. Assessment in Education - principles, policy, practice, 1, 1, 27-44. Publication (h)- Hager, P., Athanasou, J. and Gonczi, A. (1994). Assessment: Technical Manual. Canberra:

DEET, Australian Government Printing Service (pp 158).

Publication (i)- Gonczi, A. and Hager, P. (1994). The Distinction between Skills Based and Qualifications Based Procedures for Recognising Migrants Professional Skills. International Migration, XXXIII, 1, 127-144.

Publication (j)- Gonczi, A. (1996). Future Directions for Vocational Education in Australian Secondary Schools. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Vocational Education Research (forthcoming). This is an adaptation of the paper below. Gonczi, A. (1995). Future directions for post compulsory education: integrated

competency based approaches to vocational education in NSW. Paper presented at the Vocational Education in Schools conference. May. Coffs Harbour (pp33).

Publication (k)- Gonczi, A. (1996). Competence Based Assessment by Alison Wolf. Review Symposium, Assessment in Education, 3, 2, 241-247.

Appendix (a)- Ash, S., Gonczi, A. and Hager, P. (1992). Combining Research Methodologies to Develop Competency-Based Standards for Dietitians: A Case Study for the Professions. National Office of Overseas Skills Recognition Research Paper No. 6, DEET. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.

Appendix (b) - Gonczi, A. Hager, P. and Palmer, C. (1994). Performance Based Assessment and the NSW Law Specialist Accreditation Program. The Journal of Professional Legal Education, 12, 2, 135-149.

Appendix (c)- Gonczi, A., Curtain, R., Hager, P., Hallard, A. and Harrison, J. (1995). Key Competencies in on-the-job Training. Sydney: UTS-DIRETFE.

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LINKING ESSAY

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CONTENTS

The thesis P 1

Overview of the publications P 2-3

The aims of the linking essay P 4

The policy context of competency-based education P 4-16

Education policy in Australia and the link with international developments.

The relationship between the competency debate and wider policy issues

The theoretical context of competency-based education P 16-32

The concept of competence

Key Competencies and their conceptualisation

Arguments against the competency approach to education

Implications of the integrated approach for competency

standards development P 32-33

Implications of the integrated competency approach

for curriculum and teaching P 33-36

Other uses of competency standards P 36-37

Competency-based assessment P 37-49

Introduction

Contribution of the publications: competency based assessment and validity

Further questions in competencybased assessment

Developing competency-based assessment systems P 49-50

Conclusion P 50-51

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Reconceptualising Competency-based Education and Training: with particular reference to education for occupations in Australia.

Andrew Gonczi June 1996

An essay written in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (by

publication).

The thesis

The thesis that emerges from the publications nominated for examination, is that a holistic or integrated competency based approach to vocational education and training (VET) and professional education (both initial and continuing) has many advantages over traditional approaches: It provides a curriculum framework which links practice to theory in more coherent

ways than currently exist; It potentially provides a way of breaking the old dichotomy between "knowing that"

and "knowing how" which has characterised Anglo-Saxon education and which has resulted in the belief that education which is practical is both different from and inferior to that which is abstract;

It provides the basis for teaching and learning approaches which could enhance students' adaptability and flexibility over their lives;

It has the potential for developing in occupational education more valid assessment strategies than those traditionally used and also for reducing the deleterious effects on learning of measurement-based assessment approaches.

In summary, it is argued that the integrated approach to competency-based education provides a conceptual base for the competency movement and a promising direction for educational reform for all levels of occupational education.

It is further argued that competency standards developed through an integrated approach can facilitate the implementation of a number of other areas of social

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and economic policy, such as the recognition of qualifications of overseas professionals in Australia, and the internationalisation of professional services. Overview of the publications The publications span a six-year period from 1990 to 1996. The first of them was written at a time when there was very little literature in the area (and virtually none in Australia) and when there was a great deal of confusion about the nature of competency, how to develop competency standards and the implications of the competency approach for education and training. What literature did exist, was mostly twenty years old and was largely a reaction against educational curricula which, it was felt, had failed to adequately prepare students for occupations or for life more generally. In place of a curriculum based on the acquisition of knowledge most of the critics suggested that curriculum should be based on an analysis of what people needed to do. Conceptually, as Wolf (1995) and others have pointed out, it was based on a niave reductionism arising out of behaviourist approaches to education. This approach was quite powerful for a brief period in the 1970s in teacher education programs in the United States. However the challenge to behaviourism from cognitive and humanist approaches to learning seemed to undermine the conceptual basis of the competency movement and very little was written about competency approaches until the late 1980s. As Raven (1996) has recently pointed out, the literature on competency-based education which has appeared recently is also a reaction against "something that is sensed to be wrong" (p.74). But what this is, what needs to be achieved and how this could be done is not clear. He suggests that the contemporary competency literature lacks a conceptual and analytical base and that there is little recognition of the need for a research program which develops a better understanding of the nature of competence, how it might be developed in individuals, how it might be assessed and what impact this would have on individuals, organisations and society generally. It is these issues that the publications submitted for examination have addressed. They have attempted to provide a conceptual base for competency-based education and a framework for how competency might be developed and assessed. Much of the recent literature in Australia has built on the approach which the publications originated.

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The publications can be divided into those dealing with the nature of competency, particularly the integrated model, (a, b, d, e) those dealing with curriculum and teaching issues (b, j) and those dealing with assessment of competence (c, f, h, i, k). The theme which unites them, is the integrated approach to competency and its capacity to provide a coherent framework for improved educational practices in all occupational education.

Another possible way of categorising the publications would be by educational level. For reasons associated with the traditional division of labour in our workforces we tend to think about the differences between educational levels rather than the similarities. It is usual to think about higher education for example, even when it prepares people for occupations, as substantially different from other occupational education. This is underlined by the fact that there is no term, in common usage, to encompass both what is currently referred to as middle level or vocational education, and education for the professions. Despite its specific nature, professional education is often identified with academic and general education, while vocational education is identified with practical education and is assumed to be devoid of substantial theoretical content. In fact much of higher education for the professions is practical and much vocational education is grounded in theory, even if it is not always made explicit.

A conclusion which I believe can be drawn from these publications as a whole is that the difference between higher education for the professions and vocational education for middle level occupations is one of degree rather than one of kind. Obviously most professional work is more complex than work at, say, trades level. But it is better to conceptualise these levels on a continuum rather than to see them as essentially different. There will be many instances when professionals need to do things which are routine where simple competencies are used. Conversely many tradespeople will need to use complex combinations of competencies to solve challenging problems. Hence, it is not useful to divide the publications into those dealing specifically with the professions (of which there are six- a, b, c, d, g, i) and those dealing with issues relevant to all sectors of education (of which there are five- e, f, h, j, k). What the publications have to say about the nature of competency, how to develop competency through curricula and teaching and how to assess it, is broadly applicable to all occupational education irrespective of the context in which it is discussed.

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The aims of the linking essay

This essay has three major aims: to demonstrate how the publications that follow link and form a coherent thesis; to provide a commentary on the publications, showing how each contributes to the overall thesis, and to develop further a number of the nascent ideas in the publications.

To achieve the first and second aims, this essay places the publications within the context of international policy developments in vocational education and training (including education for the professions), and the specific policy framework of the beginnings of the National Training Reform Agenda in Australia. This is necessary because the publications are in some measure a reaction to a particular educational context and policy-the introduction of competency-based education in Australia over the last seven or so years. The publications have attempted to reconceptualise the nature of competency-based education, in order to influence these education policies in Australia. There has been no attempt in the publications, however, to contribute explicitly to an understanding of the policy process itself.

More importantly this essay places the publications within a theoretical context which is not always made explicit in the publications themselves. The contribution to educational thinking made by the publications is arguably a result of being able to clarify practical educational issues through research and development of theory.

I have continued my research on some of the themes contained within the nominated publications. This is particularly the case with regard to the implementation and conceptualisation of the Mayer "Key Competencies" in vocational education and training (VET) settings. Hence, to achieve the third aim, I have included a brief account of my recent research on key competencies and tried to show the link between this research and the theoretical concepts informing the earlier work contained in the publications.

The policy context of competency-based education

Education policy in Australia and the link with international developments. Over recent years there has been an increased interest internationally in the relationship between education and the workplace. Countries in almost every part of the world including Scotland, England and Wales, Canada, the United States, Mexico, many South American countries, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, France, Kuwait, Indonesia, Korea and Thailand, have all, undertaken or are about to

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undertake substantial reforms of their vocational education and training systems. A number of them are also undertaking substantial changes to higher education and to their school systems. It is in the VET area where the changes have been most significant. These reforms include: attempts to link traditional vocational education more closely to industry requirements; attempts to increase student numbers in VET; introduction or expansion of vocational options in schools; attempts to develop partnerships between vocational and other educational sectors and to raise the status of vocational education; the development, by industry bodies with government support or participation, of occupational and employment-related competency standards which influence the content of the curriculum in both general and vocational education; schemes to facilitate student transfer from one level of education to another, and to facilitate the recognition of prior and experiential learning; blurring of the distinction between vocational and university education; attempts to increase the quantity and quality of industry training and to develop alternatives to what is perceived as a government monopoly in the delivery of VET.

In addition to these systemic reforms, virtually all the countries mentioned above are committed to a particular approach to VET-competency based education/training-though what is meant by this differs substantially between countries. What the reforms have in common is that the content of VET courses is based on occupational competency standards, that it is expressed in terms of outcomes to be achieved by students, and that the assessment of students is (at least partly) based on the criteria expressed in the competency standards. They also have in common the fact that many people outside the education profession have been involved in the formulation of the aims and content of education. This includes industrialists, governments, unionists, lobbyists and bureaucrats outside the education field. What is different between countries is how these competency standards are conceptualised, how and by whom they are developed and the degree to which the standards shape the curriculum and assessment of vocational education and training.

While developments in education for the professions have been less dramatic than those in middle level occupational education, a number of countries have attempted to link professional education more closely to middle level education and have encouraged the development of competency standards in the professions. This has been the case in Australia and New Zealand. In thesecountries the debate about competency-based higher education has been fierce and has been important in shaping the debate in the VET sector.

In the school sector, many countries have introduced reforms include greater access to vocational education subjects and which seek to ensure that the general curriculum

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includes competencies focused on the transition from school to work. [see publication (j)]

The international interest in VET, in more "relevant" professional education and in employment-related competencies in general education in schools, is partly a product of a complex range of factors associated with the national and international economies. Technological change, industry restructuring due to changes in global trade arrangements, changes in the capital and labour markets and so on, have contributed to general unease and uncertainty about the aims of education. The reforms in higher education, the upgrading of vocational education and training, and the introduction of employment competencies in the school sector, have all been justified by their capacity to increase the levels of skills and flexibility in the economy, assumed to be a prerequisite to increased international competitiveness in the global economy.

In Australia the first explicit statement which argued for a closer link between education and the economy came from the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). In 1987 the ACTU in it's Australia Reconstructed argued the need for reform of the existing award structure and the need for a greater training effort from industry. They also praised the European system of developing occupational standards and assessing students and trainees against these standards. Some of these ideas were developed in the federal government's landmark paper, Skills for Australia (1987). This paper was the first official statement of government policy on skills formation and its role in structural change in Australian industry. It marked a significant change in government thinking about the role of education and its relationship to national goals. It revealed the government's determination to harness the education system to fight Australia's major economic problems. Not only did the paper suggest the need for greater overall participation in education and training and for more private investment in training, but also that the balance and emphasis of the education effort needed to change so that it better met the long term needs of the economy and the labour market. But it went even further, suggesting that the content of education, particularly in the TAFE sector, was inappropriate to the challenges that Australia faced. It suggested that TAFE was not responsive to

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industry needs, that it was inflexible in its delivery strategies, that its structures were outmoded, that there was no national consistency, and that it needed to rethink its mission.

In 1988 the federal government sought to initiate discussion about informal training in its Industry Training: the need for change. This document suggested that training was most uneven across enterprises and that the overall industrial environment contained major disincentives to training. Some of these were industrial in nature and its recommendations linked training reform to wider micro economic and industrial reform. This general thrust was supported by the unions, who saw in the reforms a way of overcoming industrial rigidities and of potentially providing career structures for their members. This paper was followed quickly by another, Improving Australias Training System (1989), in which the government stated its desire to encourage the development of competency-based training as part of a set of wider reforms to improve the quantity and quality of training. In the same year a special meeting of Ministers of the Commonwealth and States endorsed this policy and set up a national body, the National Training Board, to oversee the development of industry competency standards. After a government overseas mission to investigate training returned in 1990, they stated in their report, (COSTAC 1990), that competency-based education and training based on industry standards would help to tackle many of the problems of vocational education and training. Later that year guidelines for the implementation of the system were published.

The sudden adoption of a competency-based approach to vocational education and training can be explained by its appeal to the key groups interested in reform of vocational education and training and in wider micro economic reform. Industry, as represented by the peak bodies, perceived that such an approach would make public education more responsive to industry's needs, a feeling shared by government and the unions. Government saw the potential of competency-based education to raise the quality of training and to underpin the creation of a national and consistent qualifications framework as part of its micro economic reform strategy. For the unions the reform of the award structure was paramount. They saw the potential of a competency-based structure to assist in that task by facilitating the upgrading of workers with competencies learnt on the job and unrecognised by the qualification system. There was little or no debate with educators and clearly, in retrospect, little understanding either of the conceptual issues or the practical problems involved in the implementation of a competency-based approach. Certainly the first attempts of the National Training

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Board to explain what they meant by competency standards was mechanistic and relied heavily on their understanding of the approach adopted in England. This approach is dealt with in a variety of the publications.

The suggested changes to VET were paralleled by initiatives in higher education. In the white paper Higher Education: A policy Statement (1988), the federal government sought to develop a balance between the traditional independence of the system and the perceived need to link it more closely to the skills needs of the economy. The subsequent systemic developments in higher education are outside the scope of this thesis. However, the White paper and government policy subsequent to it, led to an intensified debate about the role of the higher education sector in society and about the nature of the content of a university education. The encouragement by government of the development of competency standards in the professions from the end of 1990 [see publications (a) and (c)] and the Labor government's thinking on educational quality first enunciated in the Higher Education Council's (HEC) paper, The quality of Higher Education (1992) ensured that this debate has continued, with a particular focus on the content of education. The argument in that paper, that quality of higher education should be judged by outcomes in the form of attributes possessed by graduates, has already had an impact on the content of some higher education courses. Most institutions have developed profiles of the graduate that their courses seek to develop, though the extent to which their courses explicitly seek to develop these attributes varies. In addition, as has been pointed out by Hager and Gonczi (Edwards et al 1996), a number of courses in a range of universities have sought to link their courses explicitly to the competency standards in their professions.

In the schools sector the Finn report, Young Peoples Participation in Post Compulsory Education and Training (1991), and "Mayer" report, They Key Competencies: Putting General Education to Work (1993), have attempted, amongst other things, to develop and incorporate employment-related competencies into the general education curriculum.

The aim of the Finn and Mayer committees was to explore ways to develop in young people competencies which would make them more effective participants in work, more flexible and adaptable, and more able to move into higher education. These can be referred to, as they are in the Mayer report, as employment-related competencies. The work of both committees arose out of industry's view that schooling has failed to develop in students, skills that are

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'needed' for the high-skills workplace of the 1990's. The Finn report argued that Australia had inherited a tradition of education which accepted the divisions between general and vocational education and that the two needed to be brought together both for the sake of individuals and for the economy generally. It argued that schools needed to be concerned with employability and that the vocational sector needed to be concerned with more general, broader vocational education. It recommended that schools needed to be concerned with competency areas that all young people needed for employment: language and communication; mathematical and technological understanding; cultural understanding; interpersonal; problem solving. In 1991 a new committee which has become known as the Mayer committee was given the task of developing the areas outlined in the Finn report into a number of more specific competencies. In the Mayer report, Putting General Education to Work (1993), seven key competencies were developed: Collecting, Analysing and Organising Information; Communicating Ideas and Information; Planning and Organising Activities; Working with Others and in Teams; Using Mathematical Ideas and Techniques; Solving Problems; Using Technology. Later another was added Displaying Cultural Understanding.

One reading of these arguments is that they are part of a conservative agenda to refashion education in the interests of "Capital". Another, however, is that introducing employment related competencies in the curriculum is essential to equity policy-the desire to increase life chances of individuals (most often those from working class backgrounds) failed by the traditional education system.

Most academic educators have opposed these reforms on the grounds that:

they give too much weight to industry needs at the expense of the needs of students-that the reforms are too economically driven and are overly instrumental;

they attempt to control teachers'/ trainers' work through national curriculum and assessment;

the outcomes of education should be far wider than vocational outcomes and must include values and orientations related to justice, aesthetics, democracy life skills and so on.

They also claim that these reforms are inimical to the interests of students. Any vocational emphasis in education, it is argued, is technocratic, specific, practical, managerial. It supports a view of the social function of education; that it is concerned with the transmission of exploitable knowledge and participation in the market through the development of skills which possess an exchange value (Feinberg 1983).

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General academic education on the other hand is democratic, egalitarian, critical, collaborative (Wellington, 1993).

Interestingly, similar arguments are used by at least some conservative politicians. They claim that such developments are merely 'trendy', that they deemphasise the traditional "canon" and thus lead to a reduction in educational rigour. In the United Kingdom this has led to demands from some strands of the conservative heirachy to strengthen academic education (the so called "Gold standard") at the expense of education designed to appeal to a wider cohort of students.

However, it can be argued that these criticisms of the education reforms in schools (which include criticisms of the role of key competencies in general education settings) are ill founded. They rest on a view of vocational education which is both elitist and conceptually impoverished as is pointed out in publication (j). Furthermore they ignore the potential of key competencies to liberalise vocational education as well as to liberalise, even transform, the curriculum and pedagogy of general education. Incorporating the key competencies into vocational education and training will ensure that VET becomes more liberal, supporting Dewey's concept of education through rather than specifically for occupations.

In addition, incorporating the key competencies into general education may provide the impetus for the reform of traditional subjects and traditional modes of teaching (see Lohrey 1995). A key competency such as 'problem solving', for example, can be developed through traditional academic subjects but lends itself better to holistic, interdisciplinary knowledge and its application and the use, for example, of problem based teaching methods.

Taken as a whole these reports, which cover all the educational sectors in Australia, mark a significant change in educational policy. For the first time, education has been openly debated in instrumental terms and is being judged, at least partly, by the extent to which it is succeeding in advancing "national "goals related to economic restructuring and competitiveness.

The relationship between the competency debate and wider policy issues While there are always a large number of people in various roles and at many levels involved in the development and implementation of educational policy,

most of them are influenced by the dominant ideas of the day. In the last decade in Australia and elsewhere, these have been dominated by economics as Pusey (1991),

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Marginson (1993), Harris et al (1995) and many others have pointed out. In their recent book Harris et al (1995) suggest "economic factors are increasingly becoming the rationale for educational policy decisions and the means of measuring their success" (p 11). Yet as Walker (1993) has argued, it is not just the economic significance of education which has been the driving force behind educational policy, but a more general cultural anxiety which has focused on the education system as both the cause of and the possible solution to the national uncertainty. The result is that over the last decade, governments have become much more directly involved in educational decision-making than in the past. Rather than providing general directions for education, they have sought to influence the actual content of the curriculum and also the assessment of it. Some of these issues are taken up in publication (j) which examines the development of vocational education in schools in Australia and analyses the arguments for and against its introduction.

While it is no doubt true that the nexus between educational policy and the economy is being more openly expressed in many countries than at any time in the last 50 years, the link itself is not new. Since world war two successive governments in most developed countries have justified educational spending and the enormous expansion of provision largely on the basis of its economic returns- both for the individual and society as a whole. This justification became known, in the 1960s, as human capital theory. As the critics of this approach to education have long argued (e.g. Blaug 1972) there is little evidence that supports a causal link between educational provision on a macro level and economic growth and productivity. However, in the three decades after 1945 the very fact of economic growth was enough to ensure that a detailed examination of the rationale for education spending was not undertaken. The relative cultural stability of this period also helps explains the lack of desire to examine the funding and directions of the education system. In Australia in the two decades after the war, there was a far greater confidence in the directions in which the country was moving and in the nature of its cultural identity than there has been over recent decades. In retrospect, it easy to characterise this confidence as complacency and to discern the beginnings of cultural anxiety as the Protestantanglo- saxon hegemony came under pressure and the structural weaknesses of the economy were exposed. This uncertainty has certainly intensified during the globalization of the 1980s and 1990s and is at the root of much of the educational policy of the last decade. It is certainly at the heart of the currently perceived need

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to develop skills formation policies and to enlist the education system at all levels in this process. But it also helps explain the desire of a variety of groups to influence and even determine the content of educational provision. This fact is at the core of the differences between traditional human capital theory and the new skills formation theories currently championed by the OECD and adopted by most developed countries. While the traditional theory argued the need to build education systems and improve educational attainment in a macro sense without much consideration for the content of education, the new skills formation policies have concentrated on the balance between the various sectors and on the content of education within them. There have been increasing calls by industry leaders, governments and unionists, for education that is 'relevant' to industry's 'needs 'and which meets the needs of the consumer of education rather than its suppliers. (See for example the recent Allen report into VET [1994] the HEC's paper on educational quality and the Finn report into school education). While these calls for educational 'relevance' are not new, the determination of groups outside the education profession to actually intervene and play a substantial role in influencing the content of curriculum has been a recent development in Australia.

Competency based education provides a framework for those anxious about the directions of the society to intervene in a direct way in the content of education. Clearly it was (and is) the expectation of some of the proponents of a competency approach that a process of defining the tasks that need to be performed in industry (and the "key" competencies needed for effective working life) would lead to an education system that was relevant to the needs of industry.

It is important to point out, however, that the proponents of competency based education come not only from amongst industry leaders and conservative governments, but also from many educational reformers, and union leaders. While this group would obviously pursue different ends from conservatives, they too see the potential of competency-based education to address their own anxieties about the directions of contemporary society. These points are discussed in more detail below. Nevertheless, it is true that concurrent with the recent calls for education to be tied more closely to the needs of the economy, and the introduction of competency based education as a means of realising this aim, there has emerged the development of new theories about the role of the public sector. Boston (1994), has referred to these ideas as "the new contracturalism". The origins of many of these ideas can be traced to neo-classical economics and radical libertarianism. The policy implications of these ideas were regarded by

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most governments as being too radical to implement in the 1970s and 80s. However, they have evolved over recent years, and are now being expressed in ways that seem to be attractive to both governments and at least some sections of the community. In fact there has been some support for these policies from radicals seeking to make state institutions more accountable.

These ideas provide a rationale for reforming the public sector with the intention of increasing its effectiveness. The policies based on these ideas manifest themselves in the privatisation of State activities, cuts in government programs, modelling the public sector on private enterprise lines, contracting out of services and so on. The intellectual underpinning of these reforms: rational choice theory, agency theory, transaction cost analysis and the new managerialism, have existed as independent (and not particularly influential) theories for some time. What is different today is that the social and economic conditions which have resulted in the need for economic restructuring and the widespread cultural anxiety discussed above, have provided the circumstances within which these ideas can converge. As a whole, they seem to provide not only a powerful critique of traditional public policy theory, but solutions to a range of problems, including many in the area of education.

The essential argument of rational choice theory is that all individuals are dominated by self interest. In the public sector it is argued that this results in the desire to maximise budgets within all levels of the bureaucracy irrespective of the impact this has on the public. Thus, the theory argues that there should be a separation of the policy and delivery arms of government and that, at the very least, there should be a plurality of providers of services which opens public services to competition. More extreme versions of this theory suggest that there should be the complete privatisation of services which would result in greater consumer choice and an increase in the efficiency of services offered to society.

Alongside this plank of the new contracturalism is agency theory. This argues that social and political life should be seen as a series of contracts in which two parties enter into an exchange relationship. An agent undertakes work for a principal for reward. The usual reason for such an agreement will be to increase efficiency (the agent can do it cheaper/more effectively than the principal). However, the principal needs ways of ensuring that the agent performs the task adequately. These include the need to guard against adverse selection and to monitor performance. It is argued that the public sector does both these less efficiently than the private sector, though it is usually conceded that where

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output is difficult to measure there is an argument for continued use of the public sector.

When combined with the new managerialism which dominates public sector thinking, the implications for education of the totality of these theories is substantial. There is a certain logic in separating the creators of education policy from those who provide it, in sanctioning a range of educational providers, and, in an extreme application of the theory, of actually contracting or completely privatising all educational delivery. Competency-based education, which uses industry standards as the basis for curriculum, potentially takes the monopoly of the curriculum away from education authorities and lends itself to the possibility of a range of providers reaching agreements with a range of students about how and where they can develop the skills which relate to these standards. This is not to suggest that the competency movement is merely a part of the new contractualism. It has an autonomous existence related to the need for increased competitiveness. However the conjunction of these agendas has produced propitious circumstances for the implementation of competency based education. The combination of concern about the content of education and the new thinking about the public sector may explain the attraction of competency-based education for radical conservatives in a range of countries.

At the same time, however, there has been considerable support for competency --based education from progressive educational reformers. Some suggest that it provides a counter to the dominance of educational curricula by disciplinary boundaries (see eg Lohrey 1995). Others see it as a way of bringing together general and vocational education (eg Barker 1995), and of reducing the gap between practice and theory in occupational curricula, (Hodgkinson 1992). Yet others see it as a way of breaking down the dominance of institutional learning (and credentialling) and of democratising education. Even those who oppose some aspects of the competency-based approach to education acknowledge its progressive elements. An interesting article by Magnusson and Osborne (1990) for example, presents what they call a 'deconstructionist' analysis of competency based education. They argue, amongst other things, that the recent rise in competency-based approaches is a result of the populist demand for education reform resulting from the perceived failure of humanistic education of the 1960s and 70s to transform society. The failure has led both left and right wing critics to suggest educational reforms. They conclude that while competency-based education tends to reinforce the status quo, (what goes into these standards is currently determined largely by employers who thus are assured of a supply of

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individuals who are trained in their philosophies) there is the possibility of removing the control of what counts as knowledge from dominant groups and placing it 'in the hands of the people'. Such possibilities will come to fruition in better economic circumstances, they suggest.

Others, like Barker (1995), stress the progressive elements of competency approaches and suggest that they are a way of tackling serious educational problems which have been discussed for decades by progressives, but for which they have offered few solutions. In a clear delineation of the social and political factors which led to the standards and qualifications framework of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, he points out that the value ascribed to various qualifications by society has largely been a result of factors to do with social and class divisions rather than the intrinsic value of the qualifications themselves. Effectively those qualifications which stressed the abstract and general have been given higher status than those which stressed the practical. This general /vocational dichotomy he suggests have led to:

a binary division of qualifications, binary sectors of learning, binary division of social and financial rewards. This polarity has created extremes which haunt our social, economic and educational structures. We need whole citizens, integrated knowledge and skills but we have a fundamental division rooted in our thinking and behaviour which prevents this (p. 19)

He suggests that students employers and governments want and need a system which is based on outcomes, which abandons the "dubious morality" of norm referenced assessment and replaces it with performance assessment based on the holistic notion of integrating skills and knowledge. Similar points are made in publication (j), where the arguments for vocational education in schools are examined.

In summary the competency movement in general and the key competency movement in particular, exists within a complex policy environment. While their opponents would claim that they are a manifestation of a conservative political agenda, their proponents see in them a potential weapon to challenge such an agenda. The competency debate has made the question of purposes and outcomes of education explicit and therefore open to political debate in ways that have not occurred previously. The debate about competency-based education is also a case study of the complexity of public policy in the contemporary world. The fact that there is support for the competency agenda from groups which would usually be in conflict, is a particular instance of the more general

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disintegration of conventional political and social alliances in developed countries.

It is hardly surprising, given the politically charged atmosphere in which it was first advocated, that there has been little real analysis of the nature of such education and the concepts on which it is based.

The theoretical context of competency-based education

The concept of competence

Competence is a difficult concept which can be explained and interpreted in a variety of ways. As Stevenson (1995) has argued, 'constructions' of competence alter in different contexts. The meaning given to competence in everyday life, in VET settings and in other academic settings, are quite different. What is more, they are likely to change over time within each of these contexts and also to alter according to different value positions within them. That is, competency-based standards and the education based on them, have a normative component.

It is in explaining the nature of competency that the publications which are included in this thesis have made their major contribution. The conceptualisation advanced in these publications has had an effect on the metamorphosis of the concept in VET and in professional education. The current understanding of the concept in VET has changed considerably over the last six years and is much closer today to the ideas contained in these publications than it was in 1990. In the university sector, in those instances where competency approaches have been used as the basis of curriculum and assessment they are based on the integrated model outlined in the publications.

The competency of individuals derives from their possessing a set of attributes (such as knowledge, values, skills and attitudes) which they use in various combinations to undertake occupational tasks. Thus, the definition of a competent person is one who possesses the attributes necessary for job performance to the appropriate standard. Some tasks in some contexts will be quite specific and will require simple specific combinations of attributes. In other contexts, similar tasks will require more complex combinations of attributes because they have, say, to be completed more quickly or in more difficult circumstances. All occupations contain fairly general tasks eg planning an activity, which will require different combinations of attributes. This

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conceptualisation of competence has become know as the integrated approach to competency and is discussed in more detail in publications (a) and (b) and (e).

What is suggested in the publications is that the nature of the concept is relational-linking attributes and tasks, within one conceptual framework. In doing this, this concept of competency goes beyond traditional conceptualisations which concentrate only on the tasks that need to be performed or on the generic attributes or capacities that are said to underpin competency, irrespective of the contexts in which these need to be applied. These two traditional approaches, the behaviourist and the generic are discussed below.

Another way to think about the integrated approach to competency is in terms of the distinction between holism and reductionism. Competency standards and the education based on them are holistic in the sense that they bring together a multitude of factors in explaining and developing successful occupational performance. There are a number of ways in which the integrated approach to competency can be said to be holistic: First there is the point made above about the need to link (combinations of) attributes with tasks. Second is the way we think about tasks themselves. The usual way of doing this is within a behaviourist framework. Here the approach is to break down (or reduce) tasks into their sub-components in the hope of arriving as their essence or at 'complete transparency' as Wolf (1993) has described it. The holistic approach to competency argues the need to think about tasks at a more general level, as for example when a basic education teacher: " modifies student's programs as a result of continual monitoring" [see publication(h)] or when a family lawyer "obtains relevant information from sources other than the client" [see publication(g)]. Third is the need to see that tasks, even when thought of in this more general way, are rarely isolated from other tasks in the real world of occupations. So that in the case of lawyers, while they are gathering facts from clients, they are at the same time developing a relationship with them. Similarly, in the case of teachers, while they are communicating effectively with students in the classroom, they will also often be managing time and monitoring learning. The nature of this holism is detailed in publication (e) and discussed later in this essay in relation to the attacks on the competency movement.

Another important component in the conceptualisation of competence is their normative nature. As practitioners engage in work they increase their understanding of the culture of their occupation and of their workplace. As their participation moves from being peripheral to becoming more central, they are

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increasingly capable of meshing this cultural understanding with their technical knowledge and their skills and attitudes. This combination of attributes enables them to make increasingly informed individual judgements about how they should act in the situations in which they find themselves. Such judgements clearly have a normative aspect. They are answering the question 'how ought I to act in this situation'? Effectively, practitioners are clarifying the nature of competency in their occupations every time such decisions are made. Thus, rather than being a predescribed and predetermined set of behaviours, competency will be an ever evolving reality which allows for critique and improvement of currently accepted ways of acting. This highlights the distinction between the potential richness of the notion of 'competent performance' and the tendency towards behaviourist reading of 'competence as performance'.

Individual judgements, of course, will be guided, at a general level, by the set of competency standards which has been developed for the occupation. These standards represent the best attempts of a representative group of stakeholders to state what are the attributes needed to perform the major tasks in the occupation at a particular point in time. They are, however, necessarily quite general and do not claim to exhaust the possible contexts in which these attributes will be employed. What actually constitutes competence in an occupation will be constantly evolving as new contexts are encountered and dealt with.

The integrated approach to competency incorporates all the elements discussed above and overcomes all the objections to the competency movement that have been identified in the literature. This approach to competency incorporates ethics and values, the need for practitioners to engage in reflective practice and to come to terms with context/ culture. Finally it allows for the fact there will almost always be more than one way of practising competently.

While his approach is different, Carr (1993) reaches similar conclusions. He makes the distinction between competency as conceived of in the sense of it being a "capacity" and in the sense of it being a "disposition". In the first sense, he is referring to a more holistic view of competence, of a person being, say, a good lawyer. In the second, he refers to particular abilities which are used in particular contexts (a more atomistic view) as, for example, when lawyer x was able to communicate competently with his client. The capacity sense of competence entails "the use of judgement in the light of rational knowledge and understanding" (p.257). On the other hand, dispositions are inherent abilities which (with training) enable a person to perform effectively. The former is about

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rational action based on principle, the latter about routine and effectiveness. Both in Carr's view, are important to a notion of competence and become interwoven in our every day discussions of the concept. However, he makes the point that the starting point from which an overall concept of competence can be derived is the capacity sense of competence not the dispositional sense. Moving from dispositions as the starting point with the hope of building up a complete picture requires a reductive behaviourist approach which is a caricature of competence.

Carr's definition of capacity is at odds with the generally accepted definition which is usually cast in terms of the capability to learn and understand. In fact this dictionary definition is more akin to his idea of a disposition. But so far as the argument here is concerned, Carr's idea of capacity, involving as it does the ability to act, based on knowledge and principle, is very like the integrated conception of competence developed in the publications. It is concerned with the ability to make judgments and to act intelligently and ethically in a variety of situations. This is exactly the concept of competence has been argued for in publications (a) and (b) and (e).

Publication (a) and (e) deal with the conceptualisation of competence from a broadly (though not explicitly) philosophical perspective. Publication (g) examines the various construction from a more overtly psychological perspective, drawing on recent studies in cognitive psychology in particular. These studies add weight to the claims that there is a need for a holistic approach to competency and that contextual /cultural awareness is a vital component of the construct. This perspective is developed in publication (j) and in a conference paper, The False War: Competency based Education and its Critics [Gonczi and Tennant (1994)]. This examines the implications of a competency approach to curriculum and teaching and is dealt with later in this essay (see p. 34-36).

Research into learning in the workplace, though still in its infancy, suggests that workers/ trainees can learn general competencies without explicit instruction. Gonczi and Tennant (1994) examine some of the key research, especially the work of Scribner (1984) in her study of informal learning in a dairy. This work demonstrates that workers use the environment in which they work to develop skills which help them in their work. That is, skilled practical thinking draws aspects of the given environment, be they people, things or information, into the problem solving system. The physical environment does not however, of itself, determine the problem-solving process, but rather it is drawn into the process through worker initiative.

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Counting routines, for example, were found to be precisely adapted to the shape of things to be counted: stacks of crates five high prompted counting by fives; six high, counting by sixes. Further, experienced drivers modified their arithmetic operations and problem formulation depending on whether they had on hand pocket calculators or pencil and paper. Workers even made mental "tools" of the environment - a stack of cases becomes a counting unit, for example.

Workers also attempt to adopt the most parsimonious solution to work problems. Scribner sees effort saving as a higher-order thinking strategy, which entails the psychological reorganisation of work tasks to reduce or simplify the number of physical or mental steps required for the completion of the assigned tasks.

In the workplace, least effort strategies were acknowledged as "cultural norms". Individuals often explicitly described their active search for short cuts or easier ways to do a job. Product assemblers reformulated orders to save physical moves; inventory staff constructed mental representations that enabled substitution of short-cutting arithmetic procedures for lengthy processes of enumeration:

the hallmark of expert problem-solving lay in the fact that the experienced worker was able to use specific [workplace] and job related knowledge to generate flexible and economical solution procedures. Expert problem solving procedures were content-infused, not content free. (Scribner 1984a:39)

Scribner also found that workers were adept at problem formation. By problem formation, Scribner refers to the process of formulating not simply solving problems. Formal problem solving models, she suggests, see problems as "given", the intellectual work consisting of selecting and executing a series of steps which will lead to a solution (Scribner 1985). In contrast, practical thinking actually reformulates or redefines problems. Problems were recast in the workplace: unit price problems into case price problems; 'take away' problems to 'add on' problems; inventory men squared off irregular areas to transform counting problems into multiplication problems.

The capacity to undertake these practical problem solving strategies (effectively learning strategies) is also related to the time on the job. While experience is not a guarantee of success in developing competencies it does seem to be necessary.

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Thus the question of how competencies can be developed needs also to take into account the question of experience. Since most work-sites entail working with or at least alongside others, is it also concerned with how novice workers (or trainees) learn to interact in increasingly knowledgeable ways with people who do something competently or expertly (Lave 1988).

This conceptualisation of learning-as the development of practical thinking in a specific context-has implications for strategies to develop competencies in industry and professional settings. It challenges the tendency to mirror, uncritically, traditional formal learning in classrooms. The best way to develop competencies may be to provide situations in which learners experience real problems and in which their practical thinking can be tested against the thinking of other more expert thinkers.

The mainstream literature on the nature of expertise provides an interesting conceptualisation of what competence means in terms of cognitive structures. This literature has been widely summarised [see for example, Chi (1988), Stevenson(1995)] so there is no need to repeat it here in detail. However, what it suggests is that the capacity to act expertly depends on having an organised base of knowledge (a structure) which can be accessed quickly and which enables the expert to anticipate problems and devise strategies to overcome them. It is quite possible to equate expertise with competence as Glaser has done (Stevenson, 1995). If this is accepted, what we gather from the literature is that competence depends on a rich knowledge base which allows for metacognition, problem solving and adaptability amongst other things. Thus greater weight (and value) seems to be being given to propositional knowledge representing various schemata and able to be expressed in symbolic form, than to procedural knowledge. As Stevenson (1995) points out, however, psychologically based conceptions of expertise have changed considerably over the last 15 or so years and these conceptions reflect different values, despite the assumption of psychology being a value free science. When expertise was conceptualised as "automatic fluid action" (p.12) procedural knowledge was accorded higher value. Partly as a result of this recognition of the values implicit in the mainstream research, other aspects of how knowledge is acquired such as the role of context, emotions, culture, are also on the research agenda.

Recent research in the area of cognitive psychology [see for example Brown et al (1989), Lave (1988), Prawat (1993) Raizen (1994)] in addition to the work of Sternberg (1985) on practical intelligence and Scribner (1984) on the development

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of expertise through learning in the workplace, gives support to some of the ideas of competency based education. Essentially this work suggests that much learning is "situated," that is it occurs within a specific context/ culture. The implication of this for those concerned to develop competent practitioners is that there is a need to mesh subject knowledge with the demands of practice. This process incorporates procedural and propositional knowledge along with what (Sternberg, 1990) refers to as "meta control". This research provides a theoretical basis for the emphasis in competency-based education on learning in the workplace.

In summary, recent scholarship in learning theory is increasingly undermining the generally accepted view that there is a separation between knowing and doing. This axiom had been the basis of the teaching of abstract, decontextualised concepts in secondary education curriculum for a very long time. It has also been the basis of the separation of theory and practice in vocational curricula. That is, it has been almost universally accepted that in order to be able to understand, students need to be taught abstract concepts before and distinct from the context in which these concepts might be applied. However evidence has been building up which suggests that learning and cognition are fundamentally contextual or 'situated'. That is, understanding develops through students engaging in the social and physical context, that performance and understanding were one and the same thing. Nevertheless there is little hope in the short term for a comprehensive theory of knowledge acquisition and its relationship to action.

While the cognitive psychology literature as a whole does not provide a comprehensive theory about the nature of competence or its acquisition, there is a good deal of the more recent literature which could be seen to cohere with the integrated notion of competence outlined in the publications and this essay. The capacity to bring together knowledge, values, attitudes and skills in the actual practice of an occupation is the kernel of the integrated concept. As much of the recent research in cognitive psychology suggests, an understanding of the culture of the workplace and of the occupation are an important ingredient in how these attributes are able to brought together. Experience seems to be a necessary though not sufficient part of the process of becoming competent, a process which also seems to incorporate an affective dimension. Clearly there is a good deal of research to be done, but there is at least the promise of a concept of competence and its acquisition which is able to unite philosophical and psychological

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approaches and clarify both the relationship between thought and action and the normative issues involved. Key Competencies and their conceptualization

The policy context in which the Key Competencies have been developed in Australia (and internationally) has been discussed above (p. 5-14). This section of the essay concentrates on conceptual issues related to the nature of the key competencies and their significance in occupational education and argues the need to conceptualise key competencies within the integrated competency framework outlined above. The reason for the discussion being here rather than in the publications themselves is that much of the research was undertaken after the publications had been nominated for examination.

A major question which needs to be asked about the key competencies is how coherent was the thinking of the Mayer committee. The committee made certain assumptions in coming up with the key competencies: that there were such things as generic capacities which could be transferred to a variety of contexts; that it was possible to classify them into various levels; that they were discrete, distinct competencies in their own right (though they did acknowledge the likelihood of their coming together); that they were of the same order of complexity; that it was possible to develop them in students and trainees; and that they could be assessed in ways that were nationally consistent and reliable and which facilitated students undertaking the transition to work or to higher education.

As Young (1995) has argued, this was bold and probably necessary to make a break with the past, but it was not based on careful consideration of evidence about the validity of the assumptions. In fact the assumptions of transferability, foundational knowledge and the notion of generic capacities are all contradicted by most of the evidence, as has been pointed out above. Equally the assumptions about their discrete nature is contradicted by new evidence outlined below (Gonczi et al, 1995 and Hager et a1,1996).

A better way to think about the key competencies is in terms of the integrated conception of competence outlined above and dealt with in more detail in the various publications. The key competencies should be seen as being relational. They bring together attributes possessed by individuals, and the contexts in which, through performance, these attributes are demonstrated. They are at a higher level of complexity than other more simple competencies, i.e. they bring

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together more attributes, [see Publication (a)] but they do not exist without a context. So 'Problem Solving' or 'Collecting Analysing and Organising Information', for example, should not be thought of as discrete competencies to other competencies or as somehow underpinning other competencies. There is no such thing as the generic competency of problem solving - only individuals bringing together the appropriate attributes in a particular context to solve the specific problem that confronts them. Thus the key competencies are really no more than "complex" competencies as defined in the integrated model of competence. They will almost always be employed in combination with other simple competencies where single attributes (such as recalling some aspect of knowledge) are necessary but not sufficient to complete a task. In effect the key competencies will never stand alone.

There are likely to be some similarities between the combinations of attributes required to solve a problem in similar contexts. So that in solving problems in social work with troubled juveniles, for example, different social workers will use many of the same combinations of attributes. Even in this restricted arena, however, every problem will be unique and different combinations of attributes will often be needed to solve what seem, ostensibly, to be similar problems. But, in social work with the aged, substantially different combinations of attributes will be needed to solve problems, though it is possible that some will still be common to social work with juveniles. The attributes needed, however, will have to be rethought and recontextualised rather then simply transferred.

It is also dangerous to think of the key competencies as discrete stand-alone competencies. In real-world situations many tasks are complex. The more complex the work (i.e. the tasks that have to be performed) the more combinations of the key competencies are required to perform successfully. The assumption that these key competencies are discrete and that they can be divided into levels is another instance of the tendency for atomistic or reductionist thinking discussed earlier in this essay.

The key competencies represent, at a high level of abstraction, the most usual processes needed for successful functioning in particular contexts. Another danger, however, is to imagine that the processes identified by Mayer exhaust the possibilities. It is likely that other combinations of attributes that are required for successful performance will be developed in the future, eg aesthetic competence or design competence.

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Despite the fragility of some of the assumptions of the Mayer committee, the attempt to link knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to performance of various kinds is a useful synthesis. It challenges schoolteachers to reconsider the desirability of curricula which emphasise knowledge to the exclusion of its application. It challenges TAFE teachers and industry trainers to think about ways of developing general capacities in what have typically been specific, narrow curricula. The current attempts in universities in Australia to develop graduate profiles (effectively "key competencies" required by graduates) have the potential to pose similar challenges to university academics.

There are currently a large number of pilot projects throughout Australia experimenting with the implementation of these key competencies in schools and VET settings. There are also a number of projects which are summarising the results of them. Hence, it is too early to suggest whether the aims of the Finn and Mayer committees are being realised. However, some recent work carried out in the VET sector by Gonczi et al 1995 (see Appendix c) and Hager et al 1996, has produced some interesting results which provide empirical support for the utility of the integrated notion of competence. It appears from this research that work contexts both integrate specific skills and key competencies and integrate clusters of the key competencies themselves. There were many cases of this occurring in both the observation of work trainees undertaken in the first study and the trialing of approaches designed to develop key competencies in trainees of the second research project. For example, in the first report it was observed that the setting up of a banquet in a hotel required the trainees to use a range of key competencies: teamwork, communications, collecting and analysing information, problem solving, using mathematical techniques. In the second report the critical incident scenarios developed in Hairdressing for example all centred on some significant workplace incident in which a competent response integrates both a range of specific skills and various key competencies.

This work challenges the view that key competencies are discrete competencies that exist independent of context and which can be described and taught in isolation. As these research projects found, specific skills are deployed in contexts which typically changes somewhat from case to case. The requirement that skilled work take into account changing context is usually enough to bring the key competencies into play. There is the suggestion too that the capacity to use the key competencies and adapt them to new contexts rests as much on affective as on cognitive capacitie

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Dispositions such as daring and confidence seem to be important in recontextualising the key competencies.

The results of these projects support the premises underpinning the integrated model of competence. The implications for training in industry settings suggest the need to train in whole job functions rather than in specific atomistic skills. There will be a need, too, to ensure that trainers and trainees are aware of the contexts in which these competencies are being employed. For trainers there is a need to identify workplace jobs which are whole enough for the key competencies to emerge. Setting up a banquet, dealing with a customer complaint, ordering some complex equipment from suppliers etc, all have the potential to incorporate clusters of key competencies. For the trainees the awareness of their own use of the key competencies (through reflection on and in practice) can be a powerful tool in helping them to recontextualise their use of these more general competencies. The capacity to do this appears to occur through the growth of confidence ie it is affective as much as cognitive. The implication is that care needs to be taken by trainers to be sensitive to the need to develop affective as well as cognitive attributes in trainees and that this could be the key to flexibility in the workplace and, more importantly, the basis of lifelong learning. Clearly more research needs to be undertaken into the role of the affective domain in learning and acquiring competence.

Arguments against the competency approach to education

There are a number of arguments against competency based approaches to education which have emerged in the literature over the last few years. These can be classified into four categories, though they are not discrete:

1. Arguments against behaviourist approaches to CBE. Such arguments are based on the assumption that this is the only approach to competency based education.

2. A more sophisticated version of this anti-behaviourist argument, is the claim that all competency approaches are behaviourist. The proponents of these arguments, unlike those in the first category, are aware that there are other approaches, but they claim that any attempt to set predetermined standards or outcomes for education cannot avoid being behaviourist.

3. Arguments against the generic approach to competence. The nature of the generic approach is outlined in publication (a) and (b).

4. Arguments against any competency approach on the basis of its normative assumptions about the nature of "the good". These arguments are often also

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about the aims of vocational education -the extent to which it should meet the needs of industry/ professions (as opposed to the individual).

Publications (a) (b) and (e) support the first and third of these categories of argument against competency approaches. They suggests that most objections to competency based approaches are an attack on a particular construction of competence. They make the further point that many of the objections to the narrow behaviourist approaches to competency-based education are justified as are the warnings that the competency agenda, in the wrong hands, could see the development of a kind of educational Taylorism.

The publications argue also against the generic approach to competency, the third of the arguments above. The psychological literature which suggests that there is no evidence for claims of generic competencies is reviewed briefly in publications (g) and (j). Essentially this literature, and also that in the area of critical thinking, demonstrates that people cannot transfer expertise across domains of knowledge. Put another way, it demonstrates empirically that the so called higher order competencies (e.g. problem solving) cannot be transferred from one context to another, without at least some relearning. Though these points are touched on, the arguments against the generic approach to competency are not fully developed in the publications and there are a number of additional points which need to be raised in this essay.

Barrow (1991) makes the point that much of our thinking about general competencies springs from a view of psychology, popular in the late nineteenth century, that the mind consisted of various specific faculties (such as memory imagination etc) which could be treated as self contained capacities and developed by teaching and training. While recent research on the brain discredits such assumptions (for example, work which demonstrates that different parts of the brain can take over functions damaged through trauma), Barrow argues that such thinking still dominates our thinking, as in when we say that X is a creative person or Y is a good communicator. The problem with this reasoning is the assumption that these are self contained abilities which can somehow be developed as a single simple thing. In fact, there may be persons who are creative in many situations but if this is the case, it will be because the person possesses a range of characteristics some of them values, some abilities, some dispositions and so on. It is unlikely that the combinations of these things would enable a person to be "creative" or "intelligent" in all contexts.

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Barrow gives the particular example of critical thinking, and points out that it is not possible to be critical without a context - one has to be critical about something. Nor is it a matter of simply adding knowledge of a field to a general capacity to think critically. "The formal generic capacity has to be instantiated in a particular form... to be logical in discussion of art is not a matter of combining logical ability with information about art. It is a matter of understanding the logic of art, of being on the inside of aesthetic concepts and aesthetic theory." (p.12)

Carr (1993) too makes the point that in philosophy there has always been suspicion of the nature of generic abilities. He refers to his distinction between the "capacity" view of competence and the "dispositional" view outlined above, and suggests that the "generic" is often assumed to be a disposition (i.e. an ability) whereas in fact it should be thought of in terms of a capacity, i.e. the practical dimension or expression of sophisticated knowledge and understanding, which, by definition, occurs in specific contexts and consists of the working through of the normative dimensions of the particular situation.

The second and fourth arguments against competency approaches are a direct challenge to the thesis presented in this essay and the publications. Both, however, can be refuted.

The argument that all approaches are behaviourist is addressed indirectly in the publications but is more comprehensively refuted in a recent paper by Hager and Beckett (1995). They identify numerous criticisms of the integrated conception of competence. What they call the "closet behaviourist" argument, the "utopian preconditions fallacy" and the "technology of testing problem", are the most substantial. The first of these criticisms suggests, in essence, that since concepts of competence are demonstrated by performance against a predetermined standard and all performance is limited to the demonstration of behaviours, all concepts of competence are behaviourist.

The fallacy of this view is the assumption that all evidence gained from performance is behaviourist. It is in fact possible to infer knowledge, values and attitudes from performance if samples are carefully chosen. Further, the inferences made about such values, knowledge and attitudes, are no different from any other inferences about knowledge, scholarship, etc in an academic test or practical class in a formal institution. Almost all assessment uses the specific to make inferences about the general. There is also the essential point (made above when explaining the third element of the integrated approach) that an

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understanding of culture and context is essential to competence and that coming to terms with this means that predetermined standards are no more than a guide to what Walker (1993) has called "situational understanding".

The utopian preconditions fallacy is a common mistake of reasoning where conditions are set up which cannot be met but which are different to the conditions claimed by the proponents (of a policy or concept etc). In this case the claim, for example, that competency assessment cannot anticipate all situations, ignores the fact than nobody would claim this and that in any case no other method of assessment could accomplish this either.

This issue and assessment issues generally are taken up in a number of the publications on assessment [see (c) (f) (g) (h)] and in the later section on assessment in this essay.

The fourth of the arguments against competency approaches has been advanced by writers such as Stevenson (1994, 1995) Field (1991), Magnusson and Osborne (1990), Newman (1994), Feinberg (1984) and Wellington (1993). While their arguments differ in some ways, they are all critical of the process which has led, in their view, to the aims of education being circumscribed by, or even becoming identical to, the needs of industry. They variously attack the role of employers in developing competency standards (that is, of deciding what is valuable), the role competency-based education plays in shoring up the selection function of education, and the role competency-based education plays in limiting teachers' opportunities to empower, emancipate and broaden individuals. However, what becomes dear when their arguments are examined closely is that they are not so much arguments against competency-based education in particular, as against any curriculum which does not have as its basic aim the desire to broaden and empower. These arguments are largely an ideological objection to the legitimacy of economic and industrial considerations in any curriculum.

One example of this argument has already been discussed in this essay in relation to the development of the key competencies and the implications for schools (p.9-10). There are, however, some other wider arguments against the competency approach in general which need to be examined.

As Stevenson (1995) argues "[ under a competency-based system] a preemptive good is assigned to education, viz the achievement of more efficient industrial practice .... What is problematic is the nature of the norms that are adopted ... the

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ethical questions about what is good for the community has been preempted." (p.14)

On another occasion Stevenson (quoted in Quirk 1994) suggests what this good might be: "There is no room [in the current vocational curriculum based on competencies] to overcome meaninglessness barbarism or oppression... no room for such goals as wholeness ... ability to improve and transform society ... no consideration of such values as acceptance of others reason and freedom" (p.64)

The suggestion that vocational curriculum should deal with such issues is outlined in another article (Stevenson 1994) which cites inter alia work on Australian "desirable futures" concerned with moral responsibility, caring, provision of supportive networks and so on.

A belief in the desirability of a moral, caring society in which oppression and barbarism are absent need not, however, lead to the conclusion that VET curricula, or curriculum in professional faculties in universities, should deal with such issues. In fact, few of these aims are dealt with in general education in schools or universities except in a few subjects or courses. Is the suggestion that medical degrees, say, should seek to overcome oppression, or that mathematics courses in schools should seek to overcome barbarism or meaninglessness? Wherever such degrees and courses have attempted to introduce general studies subjects which have such aims they have been notoriously unsuccessful. More successful have been the integration of courses in ecology for engineers or sociology of medicine for doctors, which have more limited aims such as developing an understanding of the impact of their occupation on society. Competency-based courses in TAFE or universities have the potential to contribute to these more limited but important moral issues. Consideration of the need to accept others, the impact of an individual's occupational decisions on the environment, the ability to improve society through the carrying out of one's occupation, are all compatible with, indeed they are a component of competent practice in most occupations and increasingly (though not universally) recognised by standards developers to be so. But it is going too far to suggest that the need to tackle barbarism, oppression and meaninglessness is appropriate to such courses.

In summary, it is not necessary to draw a dichotomy between the needs of industry and the needs of the individual. While it is clear that some subjects in

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some educational courses will concentrate on the broadening of individuals, it is not necessarily the case that a subject or course which has other ends cannot be a broadening experience. It is certainly not the case that, by its nature, a competency-based approach will prevent a course from meeting needs of both industry and of individuals. There is too a hidden assumption, discussed in publication (j), that preparation for a vocation is somehow illegitimate or certainly less important than general education.

Field's argument that competency based education is a way of shoring up the selection function of education is examined in publication (b). The argument in that publication is that this view is simplistic and ideological and that the United Kingdom experience is too limited a context from which to draw general conclusions about the value of a competency approach.

Newman presents a curious analysis of competency-based approaches in a chapter of his book Defining the Enemy (1994). He scrupulously outlines the desirable qualities of a competency-based system (recognition of skills already possessed by individuals, breaking the monopoly of certain institutions that certify, breaking the regime of time based courses, concentration on general rather than narrow skills) but then he goes on:

But this is the problem. The competency movement has resulted in educators who in other contexts might be concerned with mystery, discovery, emancipation, making lists ...(p.122).... The response of educators and trainers to these calls [ for competency based education] has been to develop a form of analysis that involves the fragmentation of work into jobs then into competencies then into elements of competencies- that is, to draw up lists (p. 123)

There are two related issues raised by this particular analysis. First there is the issue of atomisation versus holism in analysis of an occupation, and second there is the issue of predetermined performance standards in that occupation (versus mystery and discovery).

As is pointed out in publication (e), atomism and holism are relative terms. While there is a clear case for the rejection of a competency approach which fragments an occupation into a myriad tasks, an analysis which can say nothing about the parts that make up the whole will be unsatisfactory. As Hager and Beckett (1995) put it, this is the equivalent of saying that we know what good

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teaching is but we can't say what it consists of. Clearly there is a need in any analysis of an occupation for some atomisation which can become the basis of a synthesis where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

It is quite compatible with the competency approach advocated in these publications, to provide the opportunity, inter alia for learners to become emancipated and to pursue discovery learning. It is also a hallmark of the integrated competency approach that there is rarely one way of demonstrating competence in any context. Certainly this is the case as contexts become more complex. That is, the approach allows for the development of the unknown and the novel. However there is an assumption that underpins the approach- that individual progress in learning and performance is enhanced by building on what is known (the standards) and that learners who know what is expected of them will be more likely to learn effectively that those who do not.

Implications of the integrated approach for competency standards development

Since the competency standards form the backdrop to curriculum, teaching and assessment issues, it is obviously important to have coherent occupational competency standards which reflect the integrated approach outlined above. Such standards need to integrate attributes with key tasks, to be sufficiently holistic to identify tasks at an appropriate level of generality, and allow for individual judgement and more than one right way of performing occupational tasks.

Two of the publications tackle the issue of how to develop such standards. Publication (a) details the methodologies that can be used for the development of standards as well as explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each of the methodologies. It also suggests the practical problems that need to be considered in research of this kind. Publication (d) Takes the general methodology suggested in (a) and applies it to the case of a branch of the teaching profession - Adult Basic Education teachers. The report: The Adult Basic Profession and competence. Promoting Best Practice, is included in the publications to