Comments on: Representing common structures

By: Simon Grant

Simon Grant — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:58:14 +0000

Tom

Not sure what you are saying is “a matter of pure context”. Certainly I agree it is vital to allow evidence to be attached to claims. That, to me, is the logic of evidence. But can’t we first separate out the logic of competence by itself, leaving evidence (and assessment, etc.) to be filled in separately?

I would take your ideas forward in this way: (a) if working well with others in the cowsheds is actually a different competence to working well with others in the fields, then that needs to be made explicit in some way. Or (b) maybe the different contexts for working well with others are secondary? In that case, the context-specific versions are sub-competences in some way? I think they could perhaps best be seen as variants or styles – see later posts in the series.

By: TomK

TomK — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:28:38 +0000

It is a matter of pure context. As with all competency statements / sources “works well with others” should have some kind of evidence or trusted source for it to be valid. Therefore we should also add to a context statement in which the decision was made i.e. in the fields or in the cowsheds.

By: Alan Paull

Alan Paull — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:35:55 +0000

This is one of the points we are considering carefully in the InteropAbility Project. The issue of granularity is potentially very important. In our current (May 2011) ‘straw man’, re-using a formal competence spec involves taking across all the sub-competences, in other words, you have to import all the granularity that’s there. If you don’t, then you’re effectively copying and creating your own competence *based on* the original. There is no Exact Match relationship here.

Personally (and this view may not be shared by colleagues in the project), I feel that there is judgement to be used to decide whether concatenating the sub-competences is to all all intents and purposes the same as using each one separately.

Of course, once you’ve imported it, you make your own arrangements for how to use it…

By: asimong

asimong — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:26:22 +0000

Rob, I think you’ve hit on an important point. There isn’t any guarantee that sub-competences can be transferred across different contexts. This relates back to my earlier post in this series. People really need to think carefully whether it is genuinely the same competence or not; whether it actually transfers or not.

Really to fix this requires an enormous amount of work, assessing whether people with a skill gained in one context perform well on the same skill in another context. When the empirical evidence is in, we have a better chance of nailing this one. Until then … ?

By: Rob Englebright

Rob Englebright — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:54:20 +0000

Perversely, by increasing the granularity at which individual competence structures can be cited I’d be less inclined to accept their validity in different contexts.
For example if I was assessing an agricultural NVQ portfolio, with evidence for “Establish and maintain working relationships with others” gained from the context of Veterinary Nursing, I might be concerned at the different natures of such working relationships.
This is rather odd, as up to now, I’d been developing a line of thought regarding the “required precision” of such assessment, thinking such detail isn’t needed… but it patently is.
I’ll try and think through what is perplexing me, and articulate it more clearly.