Competencies And Key Competencies Research Paper

Because every-day schooling, work, and social life present countless tasks and goals, it is possible to postulate any number of competencies as necessary personal and/or social preconditions for successfully meeting task demands. Competence generally implies complex action systems with cognitive, motivational, social, and behavioral components, rather than basic cognitive abilities or simple skills. Because the psycho-logical structure of such systems is frequently unclear, and the possibilities for substituting, compensating, and/or combining single components of competencies are unexplored, the psychological relations between external demands and personal competencies are often regarded as tautological. It seems as if the concept of competence reveals a negative correlation between its popularity and its precision.

What are the consequences of this state of affairs? One clear solution might be to avoid using the term competence and, of course, key competencies in scientific discourse, and to seek more appropriate concepts or terms for the intended construct. Would this constitute progress? Alternative concepts such as skill, ability, aptitude, or proficiency are not used in ways that are any more coherent or consistent. Moreover, the disadvantages of using the concept of competence are compensated somewhat by the semantic advantages. There have been many attempts to constrain and sharpen the concept of competence on phenomenological, definitional, or theoretical grounds. However, these attempts have failed to gain broad conceptual acceptance in the social sciences. This research paper starts with a brief description of the concepts of ‘competence’ and ‘key competence’ in terms of their rather vague scientific meaning and their variable practical use. It then goes on to discuss both the psychological and the educational problems so often associated with the concept of key competencies (key qualifications, core skills). The final section draws a few conclusions for educational practice, education processes, and instruction processes.

1. Definitions Of The Concept Of ‘Competence’

In general, we know what the terms ‘competence,’ ‘competencies,’ ‘competent behavior,’ or ‘competent person’ mean, without being able to define them precisely or differentiate them clearly. The same can be said for terms such as ‘ability,’ ‘qualification,’ ‘skill,’ or ‘effectiveness.’ The use of these terms as synonyms is reflected in dictionary entries as well. For example, Webster’s dictionary defines ‘competence’ as ‘fitness or ability.’ ‘Capability,’ ‘capacity,’ ‘efficiency,’ ‘proficiency,’ and ‘skill’ are given as synonyms or related terms.

An inspection of the Latin roots and historical variations in meanings reveals that competence is also understood to mean ‘cognizance’ or ‘responsibility.’ This concept of competence has been, and continues to be, used in very specific and arbitrary manners in biology, immunology, jurisprudence, and in several other scientific disciplines. However, this will not be elaborated further in this research paper. Restricting our focus to the use of the term ‘competence’ in psychology and education still leaves a wide variety of definitions. Nonetheless, in many disciplines, competence is interpreted as a roughly specialized system of abilities, proficiencies, or skills that are necessary or sufficient to reach a specific goal. This can be applied to individual dispositions or to the distribution of such dispositions within a social group or an institution (such as a business company).

In recent decades, ‘competence’ has become a fashionable (and sometimes even modernistic) term with a vague meaning not only in lay usage, but also in many social sciences. One could even talk about a conceptual ‘inflation’ with the lack of a precise definition being accompanied by considerable surplus meanings. A typical illustration of this can be found in a report published in 1998 by an advisory committee for technology and innovation appointed by the German Chancellor. The report states:

Competence can generally be understood as knowledge times experience times power of judgment. Knowledge is the necessary foundation of competence, and experience is the habitual way one deals with acquired and continuously changing knowledge. Power of judgment is a criterion for the independence of knowledge and its use. Thus, competence is always more than just knowledge or just experience (BMBF 1998, p.10).

Specific competencies mentioned in this report include: economic, technological, technical, and methodological competencies; social competencies; creativity and innovation skills; mobility and flexibility, combined with persistence, reliability, and precision.

In some respects, this report is typical of many current publications: although the term ‘competence’ is used to refer to both high-achieving individuals and successful social groups that master specific tasks and reach important goals, it is, at the same time, always concerned with the necessary learning dispositions that are available to individuals and/or the members of social groups and have to be used to solve demanding problems. The variety of meanings given to the concept of competence is seen not only in its many uses but also in the construction of compound words to express competence, such as: media competence, business competence, traffic competence, age competence, and also cognitive, social, motivational, personal, and many other competencies. It is not possible to discern or infer any coherent theory from these many uses. There is no basis for a theoretically grounded definition or classification from the seemingly endless inventory of ways in which the term ‘competence’ is used.

2. Key Competencies

In recent times, similar concepts such as key competencies, core competencies, key qualifications, and core skills have become popular in the social sciences and in educational policy. The concept of key competence is, however, no less vague or ambiguous than that of competence. Clear and well-reasoned distinctions between the two concepts are either arbitrary or nonexistent. Towards the end of the twentieth century, at least 654 different key competencies have been suggested in German literature on occupational training alone. These range from such constructs as creativity, logical thinking, problem-solving skills, achievement readiness, independence, and concentration abilities to foreign language skills, communication skills, and media competencies.

The search for key competencies is motivated by two notions: (a) the well-founded assumption that competencies acquired in school and vocational settings are learned and used in context-specific ways (e.g., within a discipline, within a vocation, within a company), and (b) that most activities over the life course take place in a variety of social and vocational contexts. This has led to the search for context-independent key competencies that are equivalent in their use and effectiveness across different institutions, different tasks, and under varying demand conditions. Why is the concept of key competence so attractive? The term generally refers to multifunctional and trans-disciplinary competencies that are useful for achieving many important goals, mastering different tasks, and acting in unfamiliar situations. For many teachers and politicians, there is also the hope that a curriculum bursting at the seams with the many competencies necessary for modern life could be reduced if it were only necessary to transmit a limited number of key competencies.

Regardless of how much scientists and practitioners agree on the formal criteria for defining key competencies, there are major disagreements about which competencies should be classified as key competencies. If one considers the tasks and demands that most people have to master in order to achieve personal success in modern societies, the following key competencies can be identified as being mentioned frequently in the available literature: oral and written mastery of the mother tongue; mathematical knowledge; reading competence for rapid acquisition and correct processing of written information; mastery of at least one foreign language; media competence; independent learning strategies; social competencies; and divergent thinking, critical judgments, and self-criticism.

When key competencies are identified and defined within a normative-philosophical and socially critical frame of reference, one derives, for instance, those key competencies characterized by Canto-Sperber and Dupuy (in press), who sketch the conditions for the possibility of a good life in modern, complex democratic societies. The authors derive some personal competencies and five key competencies from an analysis of the features and characteristics of the general idea of good living. They are not concerned with particular basic skills, but with the dimensions that define an abstract, multidimensional space in which specific skills, abilities, and capacities can be localized.

The primary personal prerequisite for a good life is conceptual competence—defined either as general conceptual competency (conceived as a context-and content-free ability) or as special cognitive competency (conceived of as a special cluster of cognitive pre-requisites and context-dependent capabilities). Conceptual competency is supplemented by procedural competency, motivational competency, and action competency. These competencies are not understood as cognitive goals; they are not curricular bounded knowledge or skills, but cross-curricular competencies. In addition to these person-oriented competencies for a good life, Canto-Sperber and Dupuy (in press) identify five key competencies that are defined and characterized on a very high level of abstraction. These are competencies for coping with complexity, perceptive competencies, normative competencies, co-operative competencies, and narrative competencies.

3. Psychological And Educational Problems With The Scientific Concept And The Practical Application Of Key Competencies

Regardless of whether one chooses a reality-based or a philosophical-normative perspective to identify important key competencies, there are always some questions and problems requiring principal or pragmatic answers. Competencies and key competencies follow no strict formal definitional constraints but are defined at very different levels of universality, generality, and abstraction. It is often noted that very abstractly formulated key competencies need to be further divided into subcompetencies. Such scientific plans have often failed in psychology, however. The underlying multilevel models can be reconstructed logically, but not validated psychologically. The different degrees of abstraction therefore mean a fundamental asymmetry in competence research: high abstraction: intellectually brilliant, pragmatically hopeless; low abstraction: pragmatically useful, intellectually unsatisfactory.

A related but independent issue is the frame of reference within which key competencies are defined. Competencies and key competencies may be identified from philosophical ideas about the nature of humankind, ideas about the good life and a desirable society, or even expectancies about present human life and social demands. There is a strong danger that the necessary skills for successful everyday life, for social and personal effectiveness, or for professional success will be trivialized when compared with normatively anchored universal competencies. Nonetheless, if one wants to go beyond an individual’s adaptation level to the world of today with its limited possibilities of further development, and change the world by equip-ping people with the appropriate competencies, it is necessary to choose a normative starting point when defining key competencies rather than an empirical one.

Key competencies are always complex systems of knowledge, beliefs, and action tendencies, that are constructed from well-organized, domain-specific expertise; basic skills; generalized attitudes; and converging cognitive styles. Without a minimal hypothetical structure and process analyses, key competencies can easily deteriorate into catchwords that refer only to desired states. Frequently, cognitive abilities, cognitive styles, and emotional qualities are viewed as constituent components of key competencies. There are large individual differences in these psychological features, and it is doubtful whether and to what degree they can be modified through learning; whether deficits can be compensated; and whether people can indeed change in the required direction. If this question remains unasked or unanswered, there is a danger that an academic discussion of key competencies may trivialize the already enormous inter-individual differences and thus lead to an upsurge in individual discrimination.

Frequently dangerous illusions regarding the possibilities and limitations of socialization and education are tied to the concept of key competencies. Many scientists suggest to an amazed public that it will no longer be necessary to acquire a large amount of world knowledge, expertise, and competencies or to work hard to learn a lot. In the future it will be sufficient, so the story goes, to possess some key competencies, to have learned how to learn, and to have acquired enough media competence to obtain the necessary information at any time in an electronic form. This will create an attitude of personal self-confidence that one can always react appropriately and creatively in response to any difficult situations in life. Modern cognitive psychology would tell us that such an educational model is not only utopian but mostly just nonsense.

The more general a competence or strategy (i.e., the range of different types of situations to which it applies), the smaller its contribution to the solution of demanding problems. Over the last decades, the cognitive sciences have demonstrated convincingly that content-specific skills and knowledge play a crucial role in solving difficult tasks. Generally, key competencies cannot compensate adequately for a lack of content-specific competencies (Weinert 1998).

The lively discussions on the meaning of systematic vs. situated cognitions have demonstrated that general competencies have virtually no practical utility by themselves. Instead, specific knowledge, embedded in experience, is required to implement available competencies successfully when solving specific practical problems. For many key competencies, the question is whether and how they can be acquired through planned instructional programs. A typical example is critical thinking. Although there are special training programs for this key competence (Halpern 1998), their construction and efficiency remain controversial in scientific terms.

4. Concluding Remarks

Putting aside the philosophically and normatively derived key qualifications and concentrating on the methodologically functional key qualifications that can be used in the greatest possible range of different and important situations, one can name four essential criteria for their acquisition from an educational perspective. First, key qualifications should be capable of being learned by as many people as possible. This holds just as much for the oral and written forms of one’s mother tongue and foreign languages as for basic mathematical and statistical skills or for media competence. However, not everything that can be learned can be taught; even though key qualifications have proved to be, in principle, both teachable and learnable. Things become problematic with key qualifications such as critical or logical thinking, because these abilities depend very strongly on the individual endowment with intelligence along with interindividual differences in intelligence. As a result, it cannot be assumed that the majority of people can acquire this key competency in a corresponding way. Second, key competencies have to be highly automatized if they are to be applied in very different situations. In other words, they have to be available in the behavioral repertoire and relatively easy to access. Third, key qualifications need to possess reserve capacities for acquiring the context knowledge that each case demands, building up new experiences, and acquiring additional skills. Fourth, key competencies not only have to be acquired in a way that makes them a domain-specific expertise, but they also have to be trained through forms of situational learning to make them adaptable to fit different occasions. Viewed from the standpoint of the psychology of learning, this can be attained only when methodological key competencies are acquired systematically, but their application is subject to permanent training in variable contexts.

Bibliography:

1. Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) 1998 Kompetenz im globalen Wettbewerb (Competence in a Global Competition). BMBF, Bonn Germany
2. Canto-Sperber M, Dupuy J-P (in press) Competencies for the good life and the good society. In: Rychen D, Salganik L (eds.) Defining and Selecting Key Competencies. Hogrefe & Huber, Gottingen, Germany
3. Halpern D 1998 Teaching critical thinking for transfer across domains. American Psychologist 53: 449–55
4. Weinert F E 1998 Vermittlung von Schlusselqualifikationen. In: Matalik S, Schade D (eds.) Entwicklungen in Ausund Weiterbildung—Anforderungen, Ziele, Konzepte (Beitrage zum Projekt ‘‘Humanressourcen’’) Nomos, Baden Baden, Germany, pp. 23–43