The Journal of Competency-Based Education最新文献

Administrators of higher education are all too familiar with aligning their institutions to a high volume of standards, regulations, and other external criteria. Managing the alignment of those standards to curricula and policies may be perceived as an insurmountable task, often leading to haphazard and inconsistent documentation methods from department to department. Alignments of standards to one aspect of the university may be out of sync with a similar alignment produced in another area. The development of a relational database of standards can greatly improve an institution’s effectiveness in demonstrating alignment. Such an approach is not limited to institutions that utilize a competency-based model, but it does provide a logical method to demonstrate their alignment; competency statements are poised to demonstrate how external elements are addressed in a program.

These categories of entities are certainly not exhaustive, but they demonstrate the need for institutions to catalog and organize their approach methodically when aligning programs and policies to external elements.

Whether searching for a standard, regulation, rule, or any other external element, there is no single source of data that contain all elements in one repository. Usually, elements are published in a variety of official sources across the Internet. When an institution is ready to audit its compliance with external elements, it must first identify and retrieve the official publication, review it, and begin the painstaking process of mapping out the alignment of programs and policies. Then, this process is repeated for each individual entity with which the institution must align.

A carefully designed relational database can play a critical role in an institution’s approach to aligning with external entities. This author’s institution has developed a Standards and Regulatory Tracking database, referred to using the acronym STaRT. While the design and function of the STaRT database is customized to the institution’s unique model and program offerings, the general description of standards database applications is applicable to all institutions of higher learning.

An entity relationship diagram is illustrated in Figure 1. This diagram does not contain every field for every table, but provides a general conception of the structure and relationship of the database. The Standards Objects described above are located in the left column of the database. The Curriculum Objects are in the right column, and the Alignment Objects in the center column.

The objects are linked together with a hierarchical (parent/child) model, using tables for entities, collections, parent elements, and child elements. For example, Figure 1 shows tables for Body, Collection, Parent Element, and Child Element. The Body represents an external entity as a whole. A Body is a parent to the Collections of the Body, as one body may have one or more Collections of standard

This JCBE issue is the fourth and final issue in Volume 5 and closes out 2020. I want to thank everyone for their continued support of the journal during this unprecedented year of a global pandemic. I wish all good things to our authors, reviewers, associate editors, editorial board, publisher, and readers in 2021!

This issue has five articles, a book review, and a special editorial that represent a broad range of insights into Competency-Based Education (CBE) and Learning (CBL) from diverse perspectives, methods, and settings. The first manuscript, Making sense of K-12 competency-based education: A systematic literature review of implementation and outcomes research from 2000 to 2019, comes from Dr. Carla Evans and her colleagues at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment. The article presents barriers and facilitators to outcomes, all of which were mixed. As a result, the authors suggest that the field should coalesce around a continuum of CBE practices. As an aside, there are a number of excellent tables that synthesize the studies the authors reviewed, the factors that affect CBE implementation, and the impact of CBE elements on outcomes which are solid resources for all of us interested in CBE.

Comparing goals to outcomes for graduates of a competency-based education program comes to JCBE from Dr. Michelle Navarre Cleary at College Unbound. The author explores preprogram goals identified in the areas of personal, professional, and community, or social, goals and compares them with the graduates’ reported outcomes. The results underscore the value of competency-based education in achieving personal and professional goals. Details of the methodology and inclusion of the survey offer opportunities for replication in diverse contexts.

Drs. Melissa Bowman Foster and Christopher Jones at Winston-Salem State University explore the effects of delivery methods on the development of competency levels in their manuscript, The effects of competency-based education delivery methods on competency level: A quantitative study. Focused on the developing competency levels of 15 graduate students in a Masters of Healthcare Administration (MHA) program, their manuscript suggests that CBE delivery models are effective in supporting increased levels of competency.

An editorial by Mr. Ben Mayfield of Western Governors University serves as a section break between the research presented in the previous three articles and the original research, case study, and book review that follow. Aligning postsecondary institutions to external standards with relational databases is a technical piece with practical applications. CBE institutions, often queried about how competencies and standards are related, will find ample information to “make their case” and answer curricular and other queries with the database example that Mr. Mayfield provides.

Competency-based learning (CBL): D