Abstract
Assessing what people learn and are able to do at the workplace is a central target of WPL research. Adequate measurement instruments for the assessment of vocational competences are clearly rare though a prerequisite for accountable systems to authorize access to vocational activities on a national and international level as well as for the provision and design of vocational trainings on an organizational and individual level. The chapter draws on existing literature on competence assessment in the field of WPL in order to (1) define vocational competence, (2) carve out different characteristics of the concept, (3) describe common challenges and (4) offer validity standards of vocational competence assessment. Subsequently, new directions and desiderata for vocational competence assessment will be briefly discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
Conceptual competence implies an understanding of the principles in the domain and corresponds to factual knowledge that can be translated into an action schema. Procedural competence is an understanding of the principles of action, which usually takes the form of knowledge applications, such as ways to operate with facts, structures, knowledge nets, and their corresponding elements. Interpretational competence focuses on appropriate strategic decision-making processes that reflect a grounded interpretation of the results obtained through conceptual and procedural competence. This last category therefore entails the appropriate application of conceptual and procedural competence and constitutes the most complex and difficult ability (Shavelson 2008).
- 2.
Note however, that the claim of assessing workplace-specific competence is not valid then, even though many aspects might be assessed that also raise the probability of good workplace-specific performance.
- 3.
Henceforth self-assessment and peer-assessment as types of assessment will not be further considered, as the focus of this chapter is on assessment with the purpose of competence acknowledgement.
- 4.
An extended version of the following paragraph can also be found in Deutscher, V. & Winther, E. (2018). A Conceptual Framework for Authentic Competence Assessment in VET: A Logic Design Model. In S. McGrath et al. (eds.), Handbook of Vocational Education and Training: Developments in the Changing World of Work (pp. 317–338). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49789-1_80-1
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Deutscher, V., Winther, E. (2022). Assessment of Vocational Competences – Definitions, Issues and Quality Criteria. In: Harteis, C., Gijbels, D., Kyndt, E. (eds) Research Approaches on Workplace Learning. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89582-2_14
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