Interpreting competency standards

Ross Woods, rev. 2018

In brief, this ebook is about how to:

What are competency standards?

All competency standards contain lists of things that students must be able to do to be considered competent. Most of them have a system of levels or qualifications, with different expectations for each level. Some are very detailed and prescriptive; some are not. Some have detailed implementation instructions, some do not.

Competency standards have many different titles. In many places, and especially in vocational education and some professions, they are simply called Competency Standards. Universities often write their own, although they often address other competency standards set by professional associations. In schools, they are often called a curriculum statement or a curriculum framework. In Australian vocational education, they are called "training packages."

A syllabus (pl. syllabii) is a list of topics that students must learn. They are not competency standards because they do not contain contain lists of things that students must be able to do. However, if they are mandatory, they act as de facto standards.

Finding the right competency standards

Find out which set of competency standards is appropriate for you. In many cases you will have no choice, for example, a K-12 school must usually follow the curriculum set by its school system.

Get a copy of those that are relevant to you and familiarize yourself with them. Some government departments and associations put their standards on a website and allow you to use them freely as long as you don't reproduce them for sale. School systems normally provide relevant standards to schools and teachers at no fee.

In a few cases, the standard textbook is the only standard. (I have seen examples in both K-12 and higher education.) In a few cases, the textbook contains a formal statement of competencies, but it is mostly a very undesirable situation as it leaves the actual learning goals unclear.

Getting copies of some standards is difficult or expensive. ISO standards must usually be purchased, and their content might be disappointing. Some professional associations sell them at inflated prices. In one case, a 100 page book had lots of helpful explanation, but the actual competency standards comprised only four short, mundane sentences.

Read the competency standards and assessment guidelines carefully

Read and interpret all components of the standard. Remember that some standards use difficult language to describe simple tasks, while others use simple language to describe difficult tasks.

Read all through the units and make sure you understand what they mean. Don't forget to look for any:

If the competency standards have assessment guidelines, read them carefully and interpret them to so that you can apply them in your situation. These are usually only an explanation of the assessment protocols current at the time of publication. They mostly talk about:

 

Qualifications

Many countries have a Qualifications Framework that defines the meaning of qualifications. In the US, accreditors often define the meanings of qualifications, and different accreditors sometimes have different definitions for the same qualification. In Australia, the Australian Qualifications Framework ranges from simple repetitive tasks done under supervision to research doctrates.).

You should check that your qualification will meet its requirements and interpret unit requirements according to the qualification level for which they are offered. For example, a graduate research paper will be longer, more complex and more original than an undergraduate paper.

The same principle applies to K-12 education. First, any curriculum statement must be interpreted against standards of appropriateness for the age group of the target population, especially in early grades. Second, standards might have a system of levels. For example, schools normally have different expectations for the Special Education, mainstream, and Academic Talent streams.

A particular problem in all K-12 education, is that academic results tend to follow demographics. Students in higher socioeconomic groups tend to have higher academic achievement than students in lower socioeconomic groups. The application of clearly and consistently defined competency standards is a way to reduce the social divide.

Read and interpret the qualification requirements

When a competency standard also includes a qualifications framework, you need to select the qualification that suits your students. The qualifications framework will give you a clear idea of what the qualifications are about. The qualification and unit titles should give you a good idea of what is in it and how it works.

Some competency standards are very flexible, but some are so general that they need interpreting to be useful. For example, the unit Conduct effective youth programs could apply equally to:

Generic K-12 curriculum framewords are often quite vague and open ended, and poor or weakened implementation is frequently a problem. You can use this to your favor; you have the freedom to improve your interpretation and then improve your whole program.

You will probably also need to get other written information and interpret it according to your needs. Look up the websites first. There might be an Implementation Guide for the standards and supplementary information produced by the organization that issued the competency standard.

In a qualification, units generally fall into one of three categories:

  1. Required units. Most qualifications have a list of these and they are compulsory. They almost always include an workplace health and saftey unit.
  2. Restricted choice units. Some qualifications require, for example, "five of the following ten units." You have no choice if you will issue the qualification.
  3. Free electives. The description will advise you how "free" you can be. In some systems, schools may create their own. Other systems will define where you can get them from and any restrictions, e.g.
    1. "must be at this level of qualification or higher."
    2. "No more than one unit from the qualification level lower."
    3. "No more than one unit from the qualification one level higher."
    4. "Suit the total qualification and the students’ job role."

Check the different prerequisites and co-requisites between units. For example, to do a food service unit, students must have already achieved the relevant food safety and hygiene unit. Prerequisites and co-requisites and can make a qualification very difficult to offer. ( What’s the difference between a prerequisite and a co-requisite? Prerequisite: To be enrolled in a given unit, students must have already been assessed as competent in a pre-requisite unit.

Co-requisite: Students may be enrolled in both units concurrently, but cannot be issued one without the other. If the student is assessed as Not Yet Competent in one, they cannot be issued the other.
  )

Create your qualification

You can adapt a qualification to your local needs and teaching resources by using any permitted freedoms to define which units you will offer and how you will arrange them. In some cases, the elective units can be more important to your students' needs than the required units.

Select units on the basis of:

Students may no longer do extra units beyond the required number of units. Even so, the range of options and electives is frequently too wide for any one institution to be able to offer them all. It is for the institution (or you in particular) to decide what it can offer in any one situation.

"Pipeline" qualifications

"Pipeline" qualifications define how well a job must be done but don’t specify the particular job. That is, they define the pipe fairly clearly but don't specify what you will pump through it. You could find a generalist qualification and offer it in your specific context. In some cases, the institution can even add a line to the student's qualification mentioning the kind of specialization. For example, if you offer a general Diploma of Management to managers in hospitality, it becomes a Diploma of Management (Hospitality). They can meet all requirements in their jobs with excellence, but are quite unprepared to take a management position in another industry.

You can use whole qualifications as pipelines, especially if you select the right electives. For example:

What to do with compulsory (required) units

You get no choice with the compulsory units and students need to meet all unit requirements to graduate with the qualification. But you can still adjust them to your situation:

  1. When units are peripheral to your purposes, stick with the bare minimum requirements and don’t spend too much time on them. For example, if you have to teach workplace health and safety but the work environment is very low-risk, you might teach it all during induction.
  2. The opposite is also true. In this example, in a high risk environment, you should spend much more time on it and check the workplace health and safety requirements on all you do.

Restricted choice units

With restricted choice units, you can select units to suit your particular goals. Simple. You can also adapt, cluster, and contextualize them.

Free electives are wonderful

By staying with a small range of qualifications and using them very flexibly, you can use them to save the institution problems in needing a wider scope. Perhaps just for this kind of situation, some qualifications systems allow you to add a postnominal descriptor at the end of a qualification title. In other cases, a specialization may be noted on the testamur or transcript.

Here are my tips:

  1. You can offer a specialization by selecting and combining units in a particular field. This means that with one qualification, you can be very creative offering all sorts of things that wouldn’t appear possible. In fact, many qualifications offer specializations and suggest combinations of units for particular roles. Example 1A vocational course used several very basic workplace communication units from business services competencies to that you can use to teach English. | Example 2In the Cert IV in Business, a selection of mostly research, writing and business units results in a class-room based university admission qualification.
  2. If you want a very generic qualification that simplifies life and works for marginal students with minimal ability, you can:
    1. choose "how to have a job" units.
    2. choose units that have considerable overlap with units that you have to offer anyway.
  3. You can give students the maximum learning experience by offering units that have minimal or no overlap with other units.
  4. You can offer a de facto higher qualification by offering a few of the most demanding higher units in the field that you want to offer. [Example: College A offered the highest units in addiction recovery and case management in its Diploma of Youth Work.]
  5. You can offer a de facto different qualification by carefully selecting units in another field. [ Example 1: A Diploma of Management could have electives from construction. | Example 2 A regular teaching qual can become a specialist TESOl (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) qualification by including TESOL electives, and contextualizing other units for teaching and assessing TESOL.]
  6. You can make it easier for students to continue to the next qualification by offering core units from the qualification at the next level up. [Example 1: College B offers Diploma core units as its electives in a Certificate program. | Example 2: College K offers Master core units as its electives in a Bachelor program.]

 

What other standards will you use?

What other standards or benchmarks should you use? Some will be essential (such as licensing standards), and some will be desirable (such as professional association requirements and licensing standards in other states). Some standards might be superfluous. Others may add so much that they become unfair; they have stretched the outcome into something different.

In some situations, you should consider bridging requirements. For example, if you are preparing high school students for university admission, you should consider the university admission criteria and the associated assessments.

In vocational and professional education, some other standards that might not be mandatory but give better definitions of the level of proficiency. When ISO standards (like AS standards) reflect competency, they fall into this category. The International Second Language Proficiency Rating) is another example. You can also collect useful information from other de facto standards:

• industry or enterprise competency standards
• best practice standards
• licensing requirements
• qualification descriptions
• standard operating procedures (e.g. handbooks)
• job descriptions
• discussions with client or industry groups 		• product specifications
• equipment operating procedures
• best practice guides
• industrial relations rulings
• OHS guidelines and legislation
• skills audits
• legislation
• program reviews 		• industry publications
• course outlines
• standard textbooks
• government reports
• market needs analysis reports
• assessment records
• ISO standards

If you wish to incorprate other standards, it is advisable that you check with your supervisor or colleagues that the standards are suitable, and get their approval for the specific learning goals of the program.

Workplace standards

Vocational and professional qualifications usually require students to demonstrate proficiency at the standard of employment. Workplace standards are helpful, and might be called policies or procedures. You might be required to incorporate them into your teaching and assessment by stating when something must be done "according to organizational procedures."

Workplace standards are also essential when you are customizing a course to the needs of a particular organization. Businesses won't usually change their way of doing things just to accommodate you. (The exception is when you can convincingly show that it will improve their business, and they may have specifically employed your training as a vehicle for improvement.)

But different workplaces have different standards. For example:

Consequently, a qualification that is based on variable standards won’t guarantee that the student is acceptable in every work context. If a graduate moves to another workplace, they will need to do induction and to adjust to the different requirements.

What to do:

 

Consider clustering

In some standards, parts might overlap with each other or merge into each other. It can be better to teach and assess them together (in clusters) to cut down on many redundancies.

Traps with clusters

It is easy to make assessment mistakes when using clusters. It is usually not good practice to offer a whole qualification as one cluster. Here's why:

 

Pipeline units

Like pipeline qualifications, pipeline units don't have much information and are more like pipelines that you can pump something through. You also have several creative ways of using units:

Examples of pipeline units:

 

Contextualization

Contextualize means adapting the competencies for a particular environment or for particular kinds of people. You might need to contextualize them to suit the needs you have identified. Check with the clients first to get clarification about their contextualization needs.

Context factors include:

If you do need to contextualize units, the competency standards might have guidelines with which you must comply. But many guidelines are not rules; they are more like helpful instructions and lists of ideas on how to most effectively use the standards.

When you have finished, check with a colleague to ensure the contextualization meets the competency standards and guidelines.

 

Record your findings

Write down any factors coming up from your interpretation. This will probably be the advice you give to the client or student. It will also be a first draft of your working notes for preparing to teach.

Check. Did you miss anything?

Review your interpretation of the standards:

Now that you know what it is that students must learn, be sure that you have your own written copy.

If you get stuck ...

You might find problems with the competency standard. In an institution, you really have no choice but to comply with it even if it is wrong. However, you might be able to fix some problems through informed interpretation. For example, standards might appear unclear or inconsistent, or in contrast with other relevant standards.

The first port of call is to ask your supervisor or other people who use those standards. But the main sources of explanation or extra written information (and free advice) are the association that published them

If you are using two sets of standards together, you will also need to be clear about how they relate to each other. For example:

When you think you're finished, reflect on the whole process. What did you learn? Were there more efficient ways to get through it? How would you improve the way you did it for the next time you use a package?