DOCUBENT RESUME

ED 127 874 HE 008 183

AUTHOR Peterson, Vance T., Ed.TITLE Renewing Higher Education: The Competency-Based

Approach.INSTITUTION Toledo Univ., Ohio. Center for the Study of Higher

Education.PUB DATE 76NOTE 113p.AVAILABLE FROM Center for the Study of Higher Education, University

of Toledo, 2801 W. Bancroft, Toledo, Ohio 43606($3.00)

EDRS PRICE MF-$0.83 HC-$6.01 Plus Postage..DESCRIPTORS *Curriculum Design; *Educational Accountability;

Educational Alternatives; Educational Improvement;Educational Technology; Effective Teaching; GeneralEducation; *Higher Education; *IndividualizedInstruction; Individualized Programs; *InstructionalInnovation; Liberal Arts; *Performance BasedEducation; *Relevance (Education)

ABSTRACTTen essays are presented that consider a number of

philosophical and technical issues associated with an emergingcurriculun strategy known as competency-based education. Among themare: The debate over the relevance of liberal versus practicalsubjects; faculty renewal; the impact of reform on the student; thevalidation of excellence; and the technology of curz!_culum change..These issues axe given new meaning and emphasis when examined withinthe context of a competency perspective. (LBH)

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US 01 VZ.M1VENT OF HEAL To.DuC r 0.1 & AELF AR E

TOsAL iNSTITUTE OFEDUCAtION

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F . E "WE

RenewingHigher Education:The Competency -

based Approach

Vance T. Peterson, Editor

The Center for the Study of Higher EducationThe University of Toledo

Published by The Center for the Study of Higher EducationThe University of Toledo

Copyright © 1976 by The University of Toledo

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CONTENTS

Preface

I. Prospects and Problems ofCompetency-Based EducationThomas B. Corcoran 1

II. Jonathan Livingston Student: Competence For What?Gary A. Woditsch 13

III. Assessing Competence andCompetency-Based CurriculaFrederick J. McDonald 23

IV. Organizing the Competence-Based CurriculumRobert E. Knott 29

V. Renewal Through Competency-Based Education:For What and By Whom?Lance C Buhl 45

VI. How Do You Change Professor Fudd?Robert E. Knott 56

VII. Implementing Competency-Based Education:"Critical Thinking Isn't A Competency?"Mark A. Schlesinger 62

VIII. Notes on the Impact on Students of aCompetency-Based Framework (CBF)James L. Litwin 77

IX. Effect of a Competency-Based Instructional SystemOn Student and Faculty AttitudesMarcia Mutterer Mentkowski 84

X. The CUE Center: The Future of General EducationGary A. Woditsch 95

CONTRIBUTORS

LANCE C. BUHL, Director, Educational Consulting Study,Cleveland, Ohio.

THOMAS B. CORCORAN, Senior Project Officer, Fund forthe Improvement of Post-secondary Education.

ROBERT E. KNOTT, Dean, Arkansas College, formerly,Associate Dean for Faculty Development, Mars Hill

College.

JAMES L. LITWIN, Director of Evaluation, Division ofGeneral Studies, Bowling Green State University.

FREDERICK J. McDONALD, Project Director, NationalCommission on Performance-based Education, Educa-

tional Testing Service.

MARCIA MUTTERER MENTKOWSKI, Consultant andAdjunct Professor of Educational Psychology, Univer-

sity of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, formerly, Associate

Professor of Educational Psychology, The University of

Toledo.

MARK A. SCHLESINGER, Assistant Director, Competen-

cy-based Undergraduate Education (CUE) Center,Bowling Green State University.

GARY A. WODITSCH, Director, Competency-based Under-graduate Education (CUE) Center, Bowling Green State

University.

PREFACE

The ten essays appearing in this volume consider a num-ber of ptl:losophical and technical issues associated with an'merging curriculum strategy known as competency-basededucation. Among them are: the ageless debate over therelevance of liberal vs. practical subjects, faculty renewal,the impact of reform on the student, the validation of excel-lence, and the technology of curriculum change. These issuesare given new meaning and emphasis when examined withinthe ccvntext of a competency perspective.

This monoraph is the end-result of a regional AmericanAssociation for Higher Education conference held at TheUniversity of Toledo in April 1975 entitled, "Learner-CenteredReform: Truth or CompetencesT' Among the major presentersat the conference were several of the current kadingspokesmen for the competency-based position in highereducation. Most of them are represented in this compilation ofedited papers.

Thomas B. Corcoran, Senior Project Officer for TheFund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education(FIPSE), offers a highly personal account of his owncommitment to competency-based education (CBE) andoutlines some of the major issues to be resolved in developingindividual programs. Dr. Corcoran describes a major strengthof CBE as its ability to focus attention on the linkage betweeneducational theory and practice and its value as a heuristic in'forcing re-examination of many critical assumptions underly-ing the educational process. Dr. Corcoran's paper cites severalmajor benefits of the CBE approach and suggests some of thedangers that may lie ahead in implementing the concept.

In responding to the question, "Competence in What?"Gary A. Woditsch takes on the difficult task of coming to gripswith the normative dimensions of the several generic

capabilities making up "competence." He poses a number ofcritical questions that require thoughtful consideration by anyeducator in any curriculum: are students to be trained to becompetent members of society, or is it the proper role ofeducation to try and make them transcendent beings? Shouldcompetence reference the standards of the rnany or of the few?Can we adequately train students for the future by definingcompetence in terms of what is normative in human behaviortoday? Can higher education take ordinary students and makethem capable of extra-ordinary behavior? Dr. Woditsch isequally critical of those who seek only "the truth ensconsed inthe wisdom of the past" as of those who would relegate tohigher zducation a role of servitude to some "societalblueprint."

Next, Frederick J. McDonald of the Educational TestingService takes a look at the assessment of competence andargues that the evaluator must become cognizant of thecontexts within which competency might be expected tooccur. In order to do this, he s:_;ggests that persons who alreadyexhibit competence must be located and their behavioranalyzed in relation to the conditions under which theyoperate. According to Dr. McDonald, it is wrong to undertakeassessment simply based on a list of objective competencecriteria. Rather, as in behaviorism, evaluation must firstspecify some set of restricted conditions under which adesireabehavior is to occur, and then observe whether or not it does.He suggests, "What we need to do in the assessment process is

worry about the validity problem: the reliability problem willtake care of itself."

An administrator's view of organizing for assessment,and some new organizational features that emerged at MarsHill Collep as a result of the implementation of a competence-based curriculum, are described by Robert E. Knott. Threedistinct functions involved in the competency-based approach(stating competencies, organizing learning experiences, anddefining evaluative criteria) a re cited as critical determinants ofstructural components that developed as the new curriculum

was instituted. Such components as general studies, depart-ments, special programs, and assessment teams are describedand discussed in some detail. Various techniques forencouraging faculty to adopt a process focus with emphasis onoutcomes are discussed. Dr. Knott concludes by outliningseveral unanticipated effects of the competency-based frame-work at Mars Hill which had organizational impact.

Dr. Knott next turns his attention to the topic of facultyrenewal in a competency-based college and offers someprinciples for organizing a faculty development program. Heproposes a procedure whereby faculty perform a self-assessment and analysis of skills required for effectiveness in aCBE environment.

A second look at faculty development is provided byLance C. Buhl, who traces the development of the competency-based movement and asserts that, since competence alwaTp.been the goal of education, CBE is simply the next step towardgreater precision in the technology of teaching and learning.Dr. Buhl also argues that the competency approach is a logicalextension of the revolution in access since it is a vehicle forfocusing on the diverse learning needS of a disparate studentpop ulation.

Some of the problems and techniques relating to theimplementation of the competency-based approach is thesubject of Mark A. Schlesinger's contribution. He suggeststhat the central problem of implementing a competencefracnework is that of convincing the "committed disciplinar-ian" think in terms of lifelong capabilities that transcenddisciplinary perspectives. Dr. Schlesinger asserts that everydiscipline can contribute perspective to rearly every com-petence deemed important. He suggests, "It is not inconsis-tent to believe simultaneously in the integrity of the disci-plines and the validity of generic, transferable capabilities."

James L. Litwin and Marcia Mutterer Mentkowski con-centrate on the impact on students and faculty of a corn-

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petency-based framework. Dr. Litwin lists the essentialcharacteristics for any competence-based program anddescribes the primary components of the student role in aCBE process. He then conveniently summarizes the majorproblems and benefits reported by students during evalua-tions of several existing programs.

Considerable insight into the impact of one program isoffered by Dr. Mentkowski in her comparison of the ideal andthe real of three central components: criterion vs. norm-referenced learning, diagnostic evaluation, and public criteria.She observes: that rewards remain as an expectation ofsuccessful students; that there often is a temptation by facultyto lower module requirements when pressed by the realities ofthe academic calendar that limit recycling opportunities forslower students; that the increased emphasis on data gatheringdemanded in a competency-based framework sometimes putsoff humanistically oriented faculty and raises anxiety levels instudents who have been conditioned within traditional norm-referenced systems to fear evaluation; and, that since poorcriteria and objectives are as public as excellent ones, thepotential for overemphasis of the negative aspects of aprogram exists. Dr. Mentkowski concludes her thoughtfulessay with several suggestions for how the gap between theoryand practice might be closed in the future.

Some final thoughts about the competency perspectiveare offered by Gary A. Woditsch in a probing, philosophicalanalysis of CBE vis-a-vis general education. Dr. Weditschsuggests that general education must be dedicated todeveloping students who can build and manipuiate models oftheir world. He argues that model-building is a highly refinedcompetence, akin to cognition, which serves as .a "meta-language" allowing new manipulations and insights into oldproblems. Dr. Woditsch displays his strong commitment to theidea of general education as it relates to CBE in a number ofeminently quotable lines. He concludes his remarks, and themonograph, with a brief description of the role being played by

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the Competency-based Undergraduate Education (CUE)Center at Bowling Green State University towards developingthe future of CBE in general education.

Like any project of major scope, this monograph is theend result of the contributions of a number of individuals

besides the authors represented, all of whom deserverecognition and thanks for their efforts. Cricket Levering, ofthe AA H E Washington staff, provided excellent guidance andcounsel regaraing numerous organizational details relating tothe original conference. Significant manuscript prekrarationand initial editing of transcriptions of the conference tai.vm wasperformed by Kathy Haefner and E. Dale Berkey. WalterDouglas. Business Manager of the College of Education at theUniversity of Tolerlo, provided clerical assistance andequipment necessary to transcribe the several hours of tapes.Pat Barchick and Denise Zdunczyk, with help from CarolPethe, spent countless hours in faithfully transcribing thetapes. Finally, the doctoral students in higher education atThe University of Toledo who helped t6 organize and staff theconference deserve thanks, especially Rose Mary Healy andDonna Mayfield, co-chairpersons, and Morten Anderson,Torn Eak man, Judy Hanneken, J. Otis Haywood, Fred Kanke,Rick Sieber, Duane Whitmire and Bob Zellers. Ifdcpite themany good works of so many people, errors of inclusion,exclusion, misplacement (or worse) still have occurred, theyare the responsibility of the editor.

June 1976

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111

Vance T. PetersonAssociate Director,

The Center for the Study ofHigher Education

1.

PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMSOF COMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATION

Thomas B. Corcoran

2 would like to begin by sharing with you some personalexperiences that account for my interest in the competency-based approach and for my optimism about its potentialfor reshaping postsecondary education. I share these withyou because I believe that proposals for reform can be un-derstood better if one understands the commitments of theiradvocates. Differences in the sources a interest in an ideaoften explain the variations in its realization.

About 15 years ago I was heavily involved in the civilrights movement as a student at the University of Cincin-nati. One of the objectives then was to crack the barriersthat kept minorities out of the craft unions. There were someimportant assumptions underlying that struggle. One as-sumption was that opportunities for employment ought tobe determined by what an individual can do rather thanby race or where or how the person acquired the skills.The issues of access to jobs and being judged upon one'smerit i4main critical social issues and are part of the dynamicswing to competency-based education.

After college I spent five years teaching in East Africa.There the educational system focused upon the preparationof students for externally set examinations. Many of myAmerican colleagues assailed these examinalions. Now weall know that examinations are inherently evil and it wastrue that these exams had some serious flaws. Yet, I dis-covered that the presence of the examinations changed therelationship between the teacher and the student from thatwhich I had become accustomed to in the United States. The

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teacher became a senior par;ner in a learning enterprise.The objective of the enterprise was passing an exam :flatsome facelm,s party had written. The tedcher became a coachand the overriding concern was the student's ability to per-form the requisite tasks. It occurred to me that in situationswhere teachers both determine and apply the standards therelationship between teachers and students is marred byanxiety and guilt. I believe this to be a serious and deeplyrooted problem in American education.

Later I was designing and administering Peace Corpstraining programs. We did not know we were doing "com-petency-based" education. I do not remember anyone onthe Peace Corps training staff speaking the technocraticjargon of competency-based education. But we faced theproblem of transforming inexperienced and often unskilledcollege graduates into competent volunteers in thirteenweeks. They had to acquire competence in language, com-munity organization, teaching skills, agricultural skills andvarious other things.

In retrospect, several things stand out about this exper-ience. One was the inability of recent college graduates toapply their knowledge. The second thing was the motivatingpower of acquiring competence in a skili area. These youngpeople were willing to work extraordinarily hard in order tobecome competent in a language, teaching skill, or someother area because they knew that it was essential to theirfuture. The third thing was the importance of these char-acteristics we refer to as affective or non-cognitive; theyfrequently seemed to be the most significant predictors ofcompetence. They were also the most intractable.

The fourth experience I wish to mention came laterwhile working IlL university settings at Utica College, Syra-cuse University, and SUNY at Cortland. Two key featuresof these settings deserve mention here. The first is the cot-tage industry atmosphere of most universities and colleges.It is difficult to get two or three faculty to cooperate in order

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to solve a teaching or learning problem. Collaboration onresearch is the norm; collaboration to aid the students isexceptional. Almost all faculty helieve that academic free-dom means they have the privilege of doing their ownthing and, in fact, they are encouraged to do so. In mostof our colleges and universitizs the faculty have too muchfreedom to define their jobs and too little accountabilityfor their performance. The norms of faculty life are incom-patible with organizational functions in the area of instruc-

tion.

Later at the Educational Policy Research Center, I

participated in several funded projects that focused on theskills needed to function effectively in the latter half of thetwentieth century. I suppose the best single discussion ofthis issue was in the recent report by the White HousePanel on Youth, headed by James Coleman, which examinedthe mechanisms we rely on to prepare youth for adulthoodand found them wholly inadequate. The report arguesthe need for a youth policy rather than an educational policy.I definitely agree. The report discusses two classes of goalsfor such a policy. Let me share them with you because Ithink they would be a good starting point for designing acompetency-based general education curriculum. In fact,they are a good framework for setting the goals for anyeducational program.

The first class of goals discussed in the report is labelledself-centered goals. Included are: cognitive and non-cogni-tive skills that are necessary for economic independence and

occupational opportunities; the capability to manageone's own affairs; the capability to be a consumer, not onlyof goods but also the cultural riches of our civilization; andthe capability of engaging in concentrated involvement inan activity. They are rather generally stated but they are agood starting point for defining critical competencies.

The second class of goals is socially oriented and alsohas several parts. The first objective is contact with persons

of different social classes, subcultures, and age groups.The second is the realization that the experience of othersdepends on one's actions. The third is involvement in collec-tive efforts to attain valued goals. Only the first of these istreated seriously by American educators.

The final personal remark will be very general and per-haps too vague. I am concerned about the increasing senseof inefficacy among our citizens. The growth of pessimismis disturbing. You may ask what this has to do with post-secondary education. I am not suggesting that postsecondaryeducation alone offers a solution to these problems. I am sug-gesting that there is more at stake in thinking about theobjectives of postsecondary education than the budgetsof colleges and universities.

These remarks are intended to place me in some per-spective. They should give you some idea of why I amconcerned about the development of competency-basededucation.

Let us shift from my biography to the Fund for the Im-provement of Postsecondary Education. I will attempt toanswer three questions about the Fund:

I. How does the Fund view competency-basededucation?

2. Why is the Fund promoting it?3. What have we learned so far?

First, how does the Fund view competency-basal edu-cation? There are almost as many definitions of competency-based education as there are programs. For example, "Com-petency-based refers to the determination, attainment, andassessment of skills required to reach desired goals." Thatstatement comes from an HEW task force report ou com-petency-based education. It reads well but it isn't clearexactly what it means. Since I must plead guilty to havingwritten it, I will try to make it clearer by rending a bit morefrom that same document. The competency-based approach

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begins with the definition of the knowledge, skills, and atti-tudes Tek Wired for successful performance in a particularrole. Demonstrated competence under reaiistic conditionsbecomes the basis for awarding credentials. The time, place,or manner in which competence was acquired becomes anirrelevant issue a simple concept but revolutionary in itsimplications and quite difficult to put into operation.

There are difficult issues to be resolved in developinga competency-based program. First, it is necessary to deter-mine the goals of the institution, to define its social mission.This involves difficult value questions such as: do we wantto determine in advance the general education componentof the program or should it be a matter of individual prefer-ence? Do we want citizens who are always loyal to theirnation's policies or do we emphasize the moral and politi-cal principles underlying our government? Such questionsare always present but often ignored in designing programs.The competency-based approach, when taken seriously,pushes them to the forefront. Once the goals are defined,it is necessary to specify the behavior or competences thatare required to attain them. When the competencies arespecified, performance standards must be determined andappropriate modes of assessment developed. Then it be-comes possible to award credentials on the basis of demon-strated attainment rather than the aggregation of credithours or grades awarded arbitrarily and privately by individ-usl faculty members. Now this sounds quite simple but, ofcourse, it is not. It also sounds "old hat," and it is true thatthe concept is not new. However, taking this approach ser-iously is new.

I think the previously offered definition can be trans-lated in a variety of ways. This is intentional because theFund has tried to avoid being overly prescriptive. Instead,the Fund seeks to respond to the problems perceived bythose who work in or are served by our postsecondary in-stitutions. Thus competency-based education is viewed as

16.

an approach that is responsive to significant problems ofservice, delivery, costs, and accountability. It begins witha reexamination of goals. There are a variety of ways ofgoing about this; what is important is that the institutionreexamine its mission and make its goals explicit and opera-tioral.

The second thing the competency-based approach doesis to focus attention on the linkage between theory and prac-tice and on the oft-ignored questions of the state of the prac-tice or the "theory-in-practice." We have such problemsbecause we gradually have moved away from situationsin which people simulate the roles they are expected toperform after graduation. We have moved to an informationfocus and do not offer students opportunities for actionunder controlled conditions.

Competency-based education forces these issues. to theforefront. You cannot avoid discussions of the differencesbetween the ideal and the real within the professions. Youcannot escape issues of training versus education and thedivision of labor between college and employer.

There is a comprehensive character to competency-based education and its impact extends throughout an insti-

tution. It affects all roles within the institution. An insti-tution must be prepared to rethink its management structureand to rethink the role of faculty. Competency-based edu-cation, in this sense, is not an end in itself, but a heuristic,that forces people to reexamine assumptions. Therefore,it can be a very powerful device for bringing about improve-ments in postsecondary education.

Why is the Fund promoting competency-based educa-tion? The answer is clear if you examine the potential bene-fits. First, it establishes standards. In the labor market thereis a growing uneasiness about the value of educationalcredentials. Research indicates that the completion of acertain number of years of schooling is not a very reliable

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indicator of a person's competence or even his ability tolearn. Better evidence is required to ascertain what indi-viduals are able to do. Standards must be defined, debated,and tested against reality. This is important and the com-petency approach encourages it.

A second benefit should be increased productivity ofour educationv l institutions. A part of the mission of the fund

is to enhance cost-effectiveness. As long as time-baseddegrees and norm-referenced testing are the means forawarding credentials, there is little that can be done to im-prove the productivity of educational systems. Witnessesbefore Congressional hearings on postsecondary educationsay, "We really can't measure productivity? One reasonwe cannot measure productivity is that we have no outcomedata.

A third benefit is that it expands the choices open toeducational consumers. The presence of explicit standardsfor awarding credentials permits individuals to choose variedroutes to attain the knowloalfr nd skills needed to attaina particular credential. Work experience, volunteer parti-cipation in community service, and all other modes of learn-ing become legitimate when we have devices for measuringwhat is learned.

A fourth benefit is the improved access to valued cre-dentials. There are too many people, particularly minorityindividuals over the age of 25, who have acquired skillsthrough employment but who have been denied access toeducation and therefore access to occupational mobility.

A classical case involves paraprofessionals. As a resultof pressures from the "war on poverty" and the expansionof social services in the 1960s, social service agencies trainedand hired paraprofessionals. However, these people typi-cally were locked into these jobs and even though they oftenacquired professional skills they could not advance becausethey didn't have a professional credential. I think that ef-forts to help people break that stalemate are exciting

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A fifth benefit is the enhancement of institutionalquality. The competency approach provides a process forplanning, designing, and selecting learning experiences.People who argue that competency-based learning reduceseducation to "training," have not looked closely at thoseprograms where true competency-based education is beingimplemented. There is excitement and enthusiasm andcreativity in these institutions. I often wish that I could takethe critics and load them all aboard a plane and take them toAlverno College, or Florida State University or to The Uni-versity of Toledo, and expose them to that excitement forjust a day .Jr two. It is very contagious.

A sixth benefit comes from reducing the competitivecharacter of schooling. That is obviously a value judg-ment, but it is one that I strongly believe in. The systemhas become too competitive and the rules of competitionhave become more important than the definition of validstandards. Individuals should not be judged by their per-formance relative to their peers or, for that matter, by howfast they acquire the skills. They should be judged on theirperformance in relationship to clear standards of attainment.It seems to me that the competency approach offers a way ofresolving the terrible conflict between the concern for equity,the need to reward merit, and the attaining of credentialsfor jobs.

A seventh benefit arises from the altered meaning ofeducational credentials. If credentials are performance-based, then they will be less capricious and arbitrary as gen-eral sorting mechanisms or gate-keepers for access to speci-fic employment opportunities. There is a school of thoughtthat says, "down with credentials, destroy credentialism."I feel that that position is somewhat foolish. It will nothappen; so the next best thing is to ensurc that credentialsare closvly related to jobs or to the roles to be performed,and tItti; they are accessible to all who possess the requisiteskills.

The seven benefits described above are a list of potentialoutcomes. The results are not in on any of these issues. Onecannot say at this point that competency-based educationwill in fact bring these results. These are clainr, not conclu-sions. We simply do not have sufficient experience with these

programs to know whether they are more cost effective,whether productivity is enhanced, ur whether they can pro-duce graduates whc, will perform as well or better thangraduates of other programs. There mey be a few institu-tions that have data that address some of these questions,but definitive answers are not yet available.

I become concerned when people want immediate eval-uation results on competency-based education. They say,"Let's do a study on the competency-based approach anddetermine whether it works or not." Well, that isn't theway things happen. You must have an operational programand you must have graduates before you can really tellwhether the approach makes any difference in quality orcost. There is a need for a fair field test before one canjudge whether the whole thing is worthwhile or not.

Tom Glennan has written about those innovations thathave slow beginnings. They !Awl out slowly and then finallycatch on and take off. If you went in to evaluate such a pro-gram in year two or three, you would not find positive re-sults only developmental chaos. But if you came back inyear five or seven you would find a much different set of out-comes. Perhaps competency-based program developmentis an innovation of that character. It requires time to workout the bugs. We must have programs installed that seem tobe plausible and we must follow their graduates into thefield. You cannot do that in a year or two.

What have we learned at the Fund from our three yearsof experience with competency-based learning? The firstlesson is the danger of promising too much and going toofast. We feel that efforts to mandate performance-based

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programs at the state level or to write specific competenciesinto legislation is premature and should not be encouraged.Our position is that we need to encourage variation at thispoint. We want to encourage a variety of approaches tooutcome-oriented education. We do not want to lock thesystem into a particular model or approach.

The second we have learned deals with the problemof specifying competencies. We have learned that there aretwo traps that most people fail to avoid. The first one is

impatience. Proposals are submitted which state: "Wewant to develop a competency program in early childhoodeducation. Between August 15 and October 1, we will bringa group together and we will identify all the necessarycompetencies." This is naive. It takes considerable time fora department or program to reach a viable and defensibleconsensus about what ought to be in a program. There isalso the error of design. If permitted, some academics willdiscuss and refine competency statements forever. In aliberal arts program you can argue endlessly about the essen-tial competencies. At some point someone has to say, "Theseare our working hypotheses; this is the set we are going tobegin with. We could refine them more. TheY could bemore precise. There is still too much overlap in the state-ments. Mit we are going to go forward with it, and we aregoing to implement a program. Once it is running, we willoil the squeaks as they appear."

A third thing that we have learned is that the develop-ment costs are significant. It takes considerable releasedtime for the faculty. It takes expertise to develop the assess-ment process. It is not scr.lething that most institutionscan do on their own. However, there is a related problem.Sometimes programs that are developed with grants aredesigned so rich that they cannot be sustained when thegrant is gone. You must consider the difference betweendevelopment costs and operational costs that you can sur-vive when the external funding is gone.

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That leads me to yet another observation. There is atremendous need for less expensive modes of assessment.

am excited by the use of simulation and by the use of sit-uational observation in assessing performance. They areundoubtedly the most desirable modes in many cases butthey are also very expensive. They are expensive in terms ofpersonnel time, equipment, and design. We need to putresources into the development of cheaper ways of assessingcompetencies. Efforts are being made to develop paper andpencil tests of performance that can be constantly revali-

dated against a set of simulations or observations.

One final observation is the necessity of protecting legi-

timate faculty interests while seeking more efficient programoperation The faculty have career and professional intereststhat can be threatened by re orm. In this regard, there aretwo problems that develop in competency-based programs.One is the burn-out problem; after two or three years ofeffort you find faculty who are walking zombies. They havebeen working sixty and seventy hour weeks and theit fami-lies, their teaching, and their scholarship suffer. A relatedproblem concerns their professional development and mo-bility. Whether you are a sociologist, economist, or chemist

you need to keep abreast of your own profession and youneed to continue your own research. You have your ownprofessional goals in that area. It is hard to do that when you

are spending most of your time refining competency state-ments, developing new curriculum modules and then beingburdened with the problem of advising confused students.Competency-based education does not require less laborthan the traditional method. Quite the contrary; the com-petency-based approach demands more faculty time.

My perception is that competency-based educationworks best in professional programs. That is, it is easier todesign a competency program when you have some externalreference that acts as a gyroscope for the specification ofcompetencies and provides a way of testing them against

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reality. The Fund is supporting programs in law, nursing,medicine, public administration, social work, and teachereducation. We also are interested in the reform and therevitalization of the liberal arts and general education, andare supporting a dozen efforts to redesign such programs ina competency-based format. Yet it seems to me that the pathto development is through the professional programs andthen back into the liberal arts. It is in the professional pro-grams that it is possible to identify the common or trans-ferable competencies that should become part of the agendaof liberal arts education. I am not suggesting that develop-ments in the liberal arts must await'succevi in professionaleducation. On the contrary, I think we havc some interestingprograms underway and I believe we should continue tosupport them. However, I think that development in the lib-eral arts will be slower and more controversial and it willbe affected tremendously by what happens in professionaleducation.

Finally, I must remind you that this is not the new edu-cational penicillin. This is not the Salk vaccine or a cancercure. Some claim it is a panacea and some get angry be-cause it isn't. There is no model of competency-based edu-cation that will prescribe precisely how to do it on yourcampus. All we have are some guidelines for designing yourown model. The competency-based approach is a mind-setabout education, a mind-set that focuses on the outcomes,and which then has impact on the whole program. It requiresenormous effort and the benefits will be slow to materializebut we believe they will be worth it.

JONATHAN LIVINGSTON STUDENT:COMPETENCE FOR WHAT?

Gary A. Woditsch

Vance Peterson and his staff have a winning way withsession titles. When I read this one, I was pleased with theimaginative phrase, "Jonathan Livingston Student," and theterse question, "Competence for What?" But my pleasurequickly transformed into a kind of awe as the intimations ofthe title began to seep through. Under the easy words liesome of the most precipitous issues facing the competency-based movement, and indeed all higher education. I'd liketo try, bri-fly, to expose some of those issues and reactto them.

First, I need to share with you my meaning for the word"competence." I think of it as a close surrogate for the word"capability," and we use both words to ascribe a certainquality to purposive organisms, most usually (but not ex-clusively) fellow human beings. When an organism commitsitself to achieve something, and does so 'efficiently with aminimum dislocation of itself and its environment, we tendto view that brief history of purposive action as "compe-tent." Perhaps we witness the same organism pursue aseries of similar goals, and though the circumstances aresomewhat different in each case, it meets success in a man-ner that again and again wins from us the description "com-petent." By a sort of intuitive statistical process, we findourselves inclined to assign an attribute to the organismitself we say it possesses a certain "competence," and bythat we mean that it is disposed to meet a certain class ofdemands efficiently. So the cat is a competent moaer,the woman a competent executive, the man a competentshort-order cook.

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If we can agree that this is a reasonable usage of theterm, note two characteristics of that usage. First, we nor-mally assign the term to an organism or individual on thegrounds of past performance. Sometimes we extend theterm in a promissory fashion, as in, "that cat ought to bea competent mouser." But these are speculations. We bestowthe term for real on past performance. I point this out forlater contrast with the aspirations of competency-basededucation, which in some ways wants to make a pre-per-formance bestowal of the term, as in, "This woman, becauseof her educational experience, will be a competent execu-tive." And where competency-based education is reticentto make such assertions, society is not reticent to make suchdemands. One message from society that clearly penetratesthe increasingly frayed insulation of academe is, "We wantyou to send us competent doctors, competent lawyers andsocial workers, competent engineers, etc." So society ex-pects a pre-performance rating. That's what certificationis all about.

The second characteristic of our use of the word "com-petence" is that what we label with it is a transitive, andhence relative, quality of human behavior. We need to graspthree things before we ascribe competence: 1) The behavingorganism, 2) the demand it is striving to meet, and 3) ifand how well the demand is met. Change the character ofany one of these three facets of the process of achievement,and you change the criteria for competence. So if we want torespond to the interrogative title of this talk, we need todetermine the kind of ;reature Jonathan Livingston Studentis, the demands he sqives to meet, and how well we expecthim to meet them. Then we can be a little less than arbitraryin responding to the question, "Competence for What?"

Well, what kind of creature is Jonathan LivingstonStudent? There is a certain trend afoot these days in answer-ing such questions, and for our purposes, I think an under-standing of the trend will be more valuable than a recitation

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of the galaxy of answers it produces. It's the trend to de-scribe things in terms of aggregate norms.

Among the many ways man has sought to describe hisworld, one that holds strong vogue is to take many examplesof something and inspect them to see what they have incommon. The method is particularly dominant in the socialsciences, which through their statistical models and aggre-gative techniques have given us some powerful dipictionsof man. What I want to observe, however, is that those de-pictions are predestined to be mundane, and to exhibitabout man what is, to use Webster's phrase, "pragmatic,transitory, and ordinary."

Imagine, for a moment, all of mankind strutting itsglobal stage. Now bring to that incredible scene those per-spectives of the social scientist that throb in all of us. Wewill note that among all men, some few are exceptionallycreative, some few brilliant, some few outstandingly prin-cipled, some remarkably selfless and some supremely moti-vated. We know because these few differ from the many.When we search the scene for what is normative in thehuman saga, the arithmetic tells us that most men are notremarkably creative or intelligent, tend to be self-serving,and vacillate morally. When we look at the bulk of hu-manity, we witness the placing of safe bets, the search forshort-term gratifications, and the pursuit of low-risk futures.This is the scene the social scientist comes upon, with hispropensity to classify, count and establish mean scores."Mean scores . . . " The phrase fascinates me. It is astonish-ing that a technical term should connote so ironically andperhaps prophetically. When we aggregate man, we do infact arrive at a "mean" description of him. As we proliferatesuch descriptions and use them, as we talk about the charac-ter traits, opinion profiles, satisfaction curves, migrationtrends, mobility patterns and aptitude scales, our conscious-ness almost irrepressibly boils it all down to an image of"normalcy." And normative descriptions of behavior in the

15

aggregate subtly become parameters for what is normal andto be anticipated in the individual. Finally, what is "normal"becomes society's standard.

The real social scientist claims only to be descriptivelynormative, but the social scientist in each of us tends to beprescriptively normative. So those members of the flock whoadmonished Jonathan Livingston Seagull about his devia-tions did so because his behavior was "not normal," in thesense of not fitting the pattern of seagull behavior. Re-specting those norms, Jonathan was clearly incompetent.The assumption is that the normal seagull is a cross-sectionof the flock, just as our assumption seems more and more tobe that man and his problems are what opinion surveys,Nielsen ratings and the like make of them. So the real ques-tion is, do we want Jonathan Lhingston Student to be acompetent member of the flack? A standard, M-1 seagull?Or do we want him to be a transcendent creature, withcapabilities beyond the dominant norms who can in hisown life outstrip lives led before? Do we choose and itclearly is a matter of what we choose do we choose to let"competence" reference the standards of the many, or ofthe few?

There are emotional approaches to an answer, and thereare some that are fairly hard-headed. I think a hard-headedapproach requires a look to the future. We know that asman's power over nature increases, the future is less and lessa function of what actuarians call "Acts of God," and moreand more a function of how man wields that power. Howman chooses to behave today is the best predictor of tomor-row. Now, if what we want tomorrow is yesterday, we canmake a good cause for defining competence in terms of whatis normative in human behavior today. In ages past, whenyesterday, today and tomorrow couid be counted on to bemuch alike, the past could present a fairly straight-forwardpattern for the future the father's problems would be theson's, and the mother's would be the daughter's. But if what

16

we want tomorrow is not yesterday, but rather some unpre-cedented combination of yesterday's successes and today'shopes, the way most men behave cannot be our norm. Fora humanity that envisions a future better than its past, thosecapable only of replicating the past must be judged incom-petent.

We may have established a case for how not to gaugecompetence, but the real question burns more intensely thanbefore: How do we gauge competence? Remember JonathanLivingston Seagull's mystical mentors? When Jonathansucceeded in breaking through to new dimensions of exper-ience, and was caught in the delirium of tasting new capa-bilities, he came upon the beautiful silvery super-seagulls.The super-seagulls had a very special function. They san-ctioned the extra-ordinary as Jonathan's proper norm. Ithink that is the clue to how we set competencies. That,and one's own experience, is all one needs. Simply lookfor what is extraordinary in your own behavior. If you areanything like me, you will come up with something like the

following list:

When I use my best critical faculties, submerge mybiases, and submit my conceptions to sustained and criticalreasoning so that they go where their real worth takes them,that's extraordinary. The results, too, are extraordinary,because it is only when I demand precision of my thoughtsthat their weaknesses are exposed and I confront the needto change them.

When I use language to communicate my meaningslucidly, that's extraordinary. I'm too often satisfied to letwords convey a vague impression of what it is I mean. Attimes more numerous than I should care to admit I use

language to obscure my meanings.

When I do in fact shape my desires with concern for thegood of others, and act accordingly, that's extraordinary.I tend to the more comfortable option, which brandishes

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its immediate benefit to me and obscures the costs to others.That choice ends up being costly too, but and here's theappeal no sucker can resist you pay later.

I could extend the list through the afternoon, but I thinkyou see where I'm going. The parable of Jonathan is point-less unless we take it to mean that Jonathan was an ordinaryseagull, and that ordinary seagulls are capable of extra-ordinary behavior. The tragedy is that they are not prone toexercise the capacity, any more than are we.

At this point, someone might say, "All right, I'll evengrant you that critical thinking skills, communication skills,value clarification skills and so forth are comparative raritieson the contemporary scene. But what's new about settingthem up as focal competencies for the educational venture?Higher education has prized those attributes since timeimmemorial."

I would knock my straw man down by saying, "That'sjust the problem. We've prized them." One could easilyimagine a sequel to Jonathan Livingston Seagull in whichthe flock congregates beneath his statue periodically andrecites a litany of his ncomplishments, only to disperse forthe day's herring catch and the interminable squabbler,over nesting territories. Those who recite the litany correct-ly over a period of time may even earn a degree. Our edu-cational tradition has its parthenon of greats who in theirwork personify some of man's finest capabilities. But I sub-mit we spend more time idolizing than developing what theypersonify.

Here I side four-square with Dewey. Knowing is doing.One does not know Plato by rehearsing the fruits of hiscritical acumen. One knows Plato by doing Plato by facingreal dilemmas with one's own mind as Plato faced realdilemmas with his. When you've done that, you've learnedPlato. Before you've done that, the best you can claim is

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that you've cultivated a taste, an admiration, an idolization

of him.

When one carefully inspects the curricula and pedagogyof higher education, one experiences the cumulative shockof discovering that they exhibit very little understanding ofhow to bring a student to do Plato. As with curricula, so withourselves. We are not inclined to explore the dynamics ofour own higher order abilities. The history of science, forinstance, is frought with misleading testaments by scien-tists about how science is done. Having laboriously masteredan ability, we are content to leave its makeup implicit, andsimply employ it. All our academic disciplines exhibit man'shigher order competencies in the sense that they displaythe products of their operation, but the disciplines are in-articulate even unconcerned about how those compe-tencies can be best ignited and matured within the learner.

This is, of course, the heart of the challen3e that con-fronts CBE. In its many forms, competency-based educationproposes to martriculate competent graduates. When itmakes this proposal with an eye toward behaviors and rolescurrently sanctioned by society, CBE doesn't differ overlymuch from our better traditional examples of vocationaleducation. The task is one of shaping students in accord with

some societal blueprint. But when CBE proposes graduateswho are capable of leading productive lives in a radicallychanging world, whatever the blueprint, it sets its footwhere there is no path.

I can imagine only one way to break ground in this di-rection and still avoid litigation under the truth-in-adver-tising clause. That is for CBE to in fact embrace and focus

upon the extraordinary capabilities we've just sketchedto seek the development of critical thinking skills, communi-cation skills, problem solving skills, information processingskills, and value clarification skills. In short, to pursuetenaciously the development of those capabilities mankindhas been known to employ in its best moments.

The assumption (with substantial supporting evidence)is that acquisition of these extraordinary competenciesentails an improved capacity to identify and master the manymore specific competencies that society in its various moodswill come to require of Jonathan Livingston Student. Weneed to build Jonathan's generic capabilities; he will thenapply them in whatever specific shape his situation and hispurposes require.

We have here something very close to the rhetoric ofgeneral, or liberal, education. The only difference is thatcompetency-based education, while nodding compassionate-ly with the rhetoric, keeps asking about results. If traditionalgeneral education responds at all, it does so by somewhatgrumpily allowing that it is not much given to identifyinggeneric competencies and exploring how they might betterbe developed. The shift from rhetoric to results requires amajor shift in educational psychology.

One way of talking about the shift is to describe it asa shift from the Idolized Attribute to the Target Competency.The fate of an idol is to now and then receive ministrationsto be elevated, extolled, praised but largely to be ignored.The fate of a target is to be shot full of holes and, havingimproved the marksman, to give place to a new and morechallenging target. Given the low state of our current under-standing of how to develop generic competencies, this im-agery is appropriate. The general educator who gives hiscomforting and familiar nod to the idol ("Of course criticalthinking is important, and of course I develop it in my class-es") needs to become the general educator who admits thathis target is unclear and his aim uncertain. Once he admitsthat he does not know how best to develop generic capa-bilities, he will be on track toward developing them better.

He will also, however, need to revise perhaps reversehis sense of what is most challenging about the instructionalmission. If he is today's typical department member, heteaches at an institution which equates general education

with a stable of lower-division group requirements. Courses

in that stable are obviously the simplest and hence easiest

courses to teach, since they merely transmit introduction to

the disciplines. The instructional challenge supposedly es-

calates as one approaches the doctoral seminar.

A CBE program that embraces the development of

generic competencies puts things just the other way around.The skills and insights of the professional instructor will

never be more sorely tested than in the effort to advance the

cognitive skills of his entering freshmen. To do the job well,

no instructor would enter a freshmen classroom with other

than what must be called an "experimental" frame of mind.

"Experimental" is meant in the strict sense, which entails

that the instructor define his tentative aspirations for that

encounter more carefully than if he were approaching a

"sure" target (like a graduate seminar in his own field).He would define them to insure that the expectations he

harbors for his own instructional activity are both preciseand explicit. Only then will he be able to tell when his efforts

go astray, so that he can shape better aspirations for the

next classroom he enters. He needs to be specific enough

about outcomes to enable some evidence to register when

his aspirations or his mode of attack misfire.

If there are vital juices in the CBE movement, they

flow from a professional attitude that sees instructionalactivity as perennially problematic always in need of re-

constitution in light of new and deliberately sought evi-

dence. That is the point of CBE's emphasis on specifying

"outcomes." We do not specify instructional objectives so

that we can celebrate having defined, once and for all, our

instructional purposes and activities. We specify becausespecification prompts examination and enables us to better

reformulate and reassess this business of achieving more of

the human potential.

It's an attitude that tends to ruffle feathers, particularly

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the slick plumage of those of us who would appear all-knowing. But ruffled feathers may be our smallest expense.If we wish to deliver to Jonathan Livingston Student thecompetence for extraordinary behavior, our whole flock mayhave to behave a little extraordinarily itself.

3.3

ASSESSING COMPETENCE ANDCOMPETENCY-BASED CURRICULA

Frederick J. McDonald

What I'm going to try to do is communicate a conceptthat relates to how one might go about assessment. I wantto start out by relieving myself of a biasan ignorancethat I think is getting in the way of building effective as-sessment programs.

Dr. Corcoran referred to it when he talked about thetendency of people to write long lists of behavioral objec-tives as the way of establishing competencies. I've beenbothered by that approach for a long time. The reascnI've been bothered is because I think that it's irrelevant tounderstanding the phenomena that you're trying to assess.I'd like to illustrate that point by talking for a moment aboutB.F. Skinner. What I'm going to discuss, very briefly, ishis methodology for the study of behavior in order to contrastit with what is called "behaviorism" in the CBE movement.Quite frankly, what goes on in the competency-based move-ment I do not regard as being behaYiorism, and I wishpeople would quit referring to it as such. People who arerespectable behaviorists are embarrassed by that association.

Why isn't it behaviorism? Lets go back tu B.F. Skinnerin the days when he was first starting out. What he didin a very real way represents a methodology that I thinkought to be used in developing assessment. I'm going totry and draw an analogy between the behavioral analysis ofbehavior when we're dealing with pigeons, and that meth-odology extended into behavioral analysis for looking at theassessment problem. I'm not going to come out with a longlist of competencies because if you follow the methodology

34.

that I suggest you'd probably end up with relatively fewcompetencies.

Now the point that everybody overlooks in Skinner'smethodology is the first thing he did, which was to radi-cally simplify the environment for studying behavior. Hebuilt the Skinner Box. He built it so long ago most peopleforgot about it until it was reincarnated in the form of thatspecial environment for children. Why did he do that? Hedid it simply to get a better look at what people did undera restricted set of conditions. Think about that particularbox; you'll recognize how restricted it was. If you had a ratin the box, basically the rat could not do very much, exceptstand up in the corner and walk around in the box. Or if itwas a pigeon or a chicken, about all the pigeon could do isengage in some kind of movements.

One of the first steps in the analysis of behavior, afterhaving placed the person or organism in an environmentwhere the conditions of the environment were known, was tofind out what kinds of things they did in tnat particularenvironment. From that point on, it was possible to modifythe behavior.

Skinner didn't sit down and write out a list of responsesof the organism. He did not engage in the semantic analysisof ccmpetence. He did not engage in the semantic analysisof behavior. What he did was observe what people did undera specified set of conditions. I think that aspect of method-ology of behavioral analysis is what is implicit in all assess-ment. In fact, when you construct an assessment system youdo two things. You ask, "What are the conditions in whichyou will look at what a person can do?" And secondly,"What do people typically do in those situations?" Whatis the maximum type of performance that you can expect?

Let me take an example, and I will deliberately pick adifficult one. Suppose that I want to assess whether liberalarts graduates can think rationally about political problems.

Now instead of figuring out what the responses are that con-stitute rational thinking in political situations, which isthe way most people go about defining competence, what Iwould propose as an alternative is to begin by defining thesituations in which you expect people to think rationally.If you do that you may first of all discover that there aren'tany. Which then confronts you with the problem of values.Is it really worthwhile trying to get people to think ration-ally? As educators you may say, "Yes it is, because we wantto improve the world." But if you really were to begin tryingto specify what kinds of situations require rational thinkingwhat would you come up with? You certainly aren't thinkingabout situations at which people sit at a desk and take paperand pencil tests, because I don't know anybody who demon-strates his ability to think rationally in political situationsby checking off multiple choice items.

One prototypical situation would be one in which people

have value commitments and tilt:), are struggling to achievesomething. They want more of something, therefore some-body else has to have less. In that context what do you meanby rational thinking? Rational thinking may turn out to in-clude such things as being able to identify what the otherperson's goals art, being able to negotiate with the otherperson so that you get as much as you can without makingan enemy of the other person, and so on down the line.

Now the principle I'm proposing is that you begin with

the situation and within the context of the situation youthen define the boundaries of the kinds of performancesthat are relevant in that particular situation.

Let me take one other example, and again I'll pick adifficult one. I hope I don't oversimplify the problem. Most of

us are interested in the development of cultural appreciation.What are the contexts in which you see people manifestinga cultural taste? Well, since you're talking about culturaltaste you must talk about choice situations. That is, peoplemanifest their cultural values by making choices of doing

X rather than Y, when X is regarded as culturally better thanY. They go to Lincoln Center and attend an opera in prefer-ence to going to a rock festival. Some type of cultural situa-tions of that kind must exist. And within that context whatkinds of performances or behaviors would you expect to see?Then that would then define the matrix of competence thatwould be relevant to appreciating the particular culturalsituations, or achieving a particular cultural goal, that youwould regard as a desirable outcome of education?

There is another advantage of organizing assessmentsystems this way. And that is when you think in this parti-cular fashion, it leads you into the development of appro-priate instructional motives. That is, the two are intimatelytied together. The arse of assessment in this country hasbeen the divorce of the assessment process and the instruc-tional process. They are loosely tied together insofar as theassessment process is supposed to be somehow related to theoutcomes of the instruction. But rarely do we set up an edu-cational system in which we look at the outcomes in relationto the design of the instructional system. In reality, the as-sessment system is just a variation on the instructional sys-tem. Thus, if you're trying to develop cultural appreciationyou have to know enough about what that means in orderto design a good instructional system. And that same kindof knowledge is the same kind of knowledge that helps youdevelop the assessment system.

So what I'm suggesting to you by way of an exampleof behaviorism is that one of the first ways to understandhuman behavior is by spending a lot of time looking at peo-ple who are representatives of the kinds of outcomes thatyou are interested in. That may be the technology for assess-ment initially in its early days, for rethinking everything isalways to begin by saying, "Here is an example of a personwho has the kinds of competencies that, in fact, we say aredesirable," rather than ask, "What do you mean by rationalthinking? What do you mean by cultural appreciation?"

Find somebody, or somebodies that have taste, who are rea-sonably rational kinds of people in political situations, andobserve what they do and how they perform in certain kindsof contexts. Use the method of matching to a criterion asthe method of assessment. Measure the degree to whichthe products of education are like a representative of thepresent outcome, the degree to which they acquired thecompetence. That really is a much harder way to design anassessment system, and I'm fully aware of all the practicalproblems involved.

What I would like to see is any liberal arts educatorspend a year finding the most representative examples ofwhat the consequences of a liberal arts education are andfinding out how that person or persons act and especiallyhow they act in certain kinds of situations.

The field that I've been associated with is psychology.A number of years ago, there was a conference on creativityin psychology held at Aspen. One of the outcomes at thatconference was the conclusion that if you wanted to developcreative researchers in psychology, the way to do it was totake the people who were being inducted into the fieldand let them associate with people who already were crea-tive. That is, if your goal really is to produce people who areoriginal, then you have to put them in situations wherethey can see originality. The model criterion of competencethus be.comes the people who are most original. It's thatkind of idea I'm suggesting to you as an approach to the as-sessment system.

The goals of a liberal arts education are broad goals.They represent very fundamental changes in human beings; .

and not everyone who gets a liberal arts education comesout the way we'd like them to come out. But some peopledo. Some people obviously benefit by exposure to a liberalarts education, and if they are the representative examplesof competence, then my suggestion is that the first step inbuilding an assessment system is to study them and use them

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as the device by which you define the criteria. That alwayswill involve a combination of looking at them in certain kindsof contexts and situations and seeing how they respond tothemhow they think; how they talk; how they act. All theother problems are technical problems of reliability and allthat sort of thing. The first problem is validity. Without it,reliability doesn't mean anything. What we need to do inthe assessment process is worry about the validity problem:the reliability problem will take care of itself.

IV.

ORGANIZING THE COMPETENCE-BASEDCURRICULUM

Robert E. Knott

If any of you have read John Silber's recent article on"The Problems of Public and Private Higher Education," oras he preferred to call it, "Independent and State-Gov-erned Higher Education," you've seen his reference to the"tremble factor." Coming from an institution which is nowdirectly involved in trying to implement one of these thingscalled a "competency-based curriculum," I am presentlya refugee from the "tremble factor." Silber derived the con-cept of the "tremble factor" from the old Roman law wherethe architect who built a great arch was required to standunder the arch as the scaffolding was removed. It put apremium on making sure that the arch held, and Silber ar-gued that that's one good reason why the arches still stand.We at Mars Hill College are in the process of pulling someof the scaffolding away from the recent curriculum construc-tion and I guess that's why I'm here today and not there.

For those of you who are considering a competence-based curriculum, or looking at some of the consequences,I would begin by pointing out some of the general stages Ihave observed in the development of innovative programs.First, the stage of general enthusiasm; second, disillusion-ment; third, panic; fourth, a search for the guilty; fifth,punishment of the innocent; and finally, praise and honorto the .non-participants. Experience suggests that theimplementation of a competence-based curriculum can of-ten parallel these stages quite closely.

As a way of beginning, let me first clarify the conceptof CBC as I am using the term. First, competence is a state

of having requisite abilities or oalities, meaning that anyeducational institution can come up with a set that is ap-propriate for it. Second, a curriculum is a set of designedlearning experiences. So when I use the term, I mean simplythat a competence-based curriculum is one in which thecompetences expected of all graduates are defmed, agreedupon, and publicly stated, and that there are sets of learningexperiences designed to assist the student in achievingthose competencies. I use the term in that very generalsense because there is a tendency today to suggest that onlyspecific types of instruction are consistent with a CBC. Ipurposely mint to leave the instructional design open.

There are three functions that are involved in compe-tence-based education. They are three distinct functions:the stating of the competencies, the organization of theactual learning experiences which form the curricular struc-ture of the institution, and the development of sets of eval-uative criteria which define the achievement of 'competen-cies. Figure 1 outlines a set of competencies that we areworking with at Mars Hill College. The document that de-scribes these is quite lengthy and each of these compe-tencies is spelled out in detail. There are seven basic corn-petencies in what would normally be considered generaleducation or general studies, and there is a seventh com-petency of a specialized nature.

FIGURE I. MARS HILL COLLEGEALL-COLLEGE COMPETENCE STATEMENTS

I. A graduate of Mars Hill College is competent incommunication skills.

II. A graduate a Mars Hill College can use knowledgegained in self-assessment to further his own personaldevelopment.

III. A graduate of Mars Hill College comprehends the

major values of his own and one foreign culture,can analyze relationships of values between thecultures and can appraise the influence of thosevalues on contemporary societal developments inthe cultures.

IV. A graduate of Mars Hill College understands thenature of aesthetic perception and is aware of thesignificance of creative and aesthetic dimensions ofhis own experience which he can compare to othercultures.

V. A graduate of Mars Hill College understands thebasic elements of the scientific method of inquiry,applies this understanding by acquiring and analyzinginformation which leads to scientific conclusions andappraises those conclusions.

VI. A graduate of Mars Hill College has examined severalattempts to achieve a unified world view and knowshow such attempts are made. The graduate isaware of the broad questions that have been posed inthe history, philosophy and religion of WesternCivilization and can assess the validity of answersgiven to these broad questions in terms of internalconsistency, comparative analyses and his ownposition.

VII. A graduate of Mars Hill College is competent in anarea of specialization.

Simply stated, competence areas are areas of knowled3eor skill specialization. They have varying amounts of curri-cular credit depending on what is required to achieve eachone, such as time and effort necessary to achieve them.Many of these, from communication skills through self-knowledge, are very traditional in the way they are stated.There is one dealing with values and culture, one dealingwith aesthetics, one dealing with the sciences, and finally

one dealing with a synoptic world view of the humanities.Those of you familiar with Philip Phenix's book Realms ofMeaning know that the selection of these was greatly in-fluenced by his discussion. They are, in fact, modificationsof his basic areas of curriculum.

So how does one go about organizing an institutionto develop competencies in students? I think the organiza-tion of the curriculum must reflect the needs and prioritiesof the institution that is setting them up, and differentcompetence-based programs will have different structuresand processes.

The topic of the conference is "Truth or CompetencesrI must say that if truth is thcught of as a universal or quasi-eternal end of education then competences are on the rela-tivistic end of the spectrum. I am not personally convincedthat there is a set of generic competencies that everyonemust master. If choice of competencies is in order, then theremust be some kind of organizing scheme for dividing ourenergies and beginning to think of particular institutionsand their different curricula which competencies they deemimportant and the problems they must deal with in setting upa curriculum based on them.

At Mars Hill we created a separate division of generalstudies. The division of general studies does not consist ofdepartments. It consists of all faculty who are contractedto work on the general college competencies either in design-ing competence statements, setting of assessment criteria,or actually providing learning experiences for students.(Figure 2.)

The key to interpreting this particular diagram of ourorganization is the point at the bottom where faculty havejoint appointments at our institution. We needed to getsome faculty movement toward implementation. We had awhole range of competencies, often unrelated across thecollege, and people working in different ways on different

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ones. We finally had to devise a contract system wherefaculty responsibilities were spelled out rather explicitly.Almost all faculty members have joint appointments be-tween general studies, academic departments, and programs.and know explicitly where energies are to be direcltd.

I said that in designing curricula, such curricula shouldreflect the priorities of given institutions. At Mars Hill,general studies was probably somewhat like other generalstudies programs that you have seen. It consisted of distri-bution requirements where one chooses one course fromcolumn A, two from column B and puts those courses to-gether so that somehow a worthwhile educational experienceresults. We had assumed that we were generating generalcompetence all along. When we began to take the outcomesof our program seriously and tried to state them clearlyso that everyone knew what we were about, we soon foundthat general studies was really a hodgepodge of courses of-fered by departments for their majors and the general stu-dent was allowed to partake of them in the name of generalstudies. The redesigned organizational scheme called thiscurriculum into question and serious debates began toemerge among faculty who were contracted to the differentcompetence areas.

After the organization was restructured, each of theareas in general studies had to be organized as well. Undergeneral studies we created the positions of associate academ-ic dean and area chairpersons. These work with those facultywho are contracted to them for one or two or more coursesduring the year. Each competence area also has an assess-ment team responsible for assessing students in that area.The associate dean, chairperson, faculty, and assessmentteam compose an organizational unit of general studies.Assessment teams are composed of people from the facultyand people from the community outside the college. Eachassessment team has places for students who have movedthrough the program and demonstrate that they have that

competence. Mars Hill College will begin to put studentson the assessment teams as they demonstrate competence.We're still in the earlier stages and we have very few stu-dents who have demonstrated any of these competences.

The assessors work with the contracted faculty who areoffering the learning experiences. First, the competencestatement is set. Then, the criteria are specified and theassessment team is charged with the assessment of everystudent seeking certification in that competence area. Theproblem of organizing for assessment is a difficult one.We tried to avoid a situation where every student goes be-fore an entire assessment team in order to demonstrate thathe or she has this or that competency. We also tried to avoidthe alternative found in our present curriculum that when astudent passed any course he or she was automatically con-sidered competent.

We tried to find a middle ground. We found institutionsthat had encountered problems using either alternative.We dem led that the assessment teams, rather than directlyassessing all students, would be responsible for trainingassessors in their competence area. Faculty members andpeople from the community would be trained as assessors.Then assessment authority could be delegated to thesetrained people. When they make a judgment, it is often oneperson making the judgment. Sometimes it may be two ormore people making a judgment, depending on the area ofthe program. When that judgment is made it is recorded onthe student's records and that is the certification of compe-tency that we require.

The major task in organizing was to get these assess-ment teams to understand that their responsibility was todirect, not do, the assessment of students. We looked atseveral programs where students were coming in front offour, five, or six people and trying to demonstrate theircompetence several times. The anxiety produced in students

46

seemed detrimental to educational progress and we triedto avoid creating it in our program.

Assessment teams are responsible for the certificationof students, though they are encouraged t- delegate suchauthority. Let ire give an example of the control .exercisedby an assessment team which has delegated authority.

Let's assume that 1 as a faculty member have authoritydelegated to me to assess a student in the synoptics orhumanities competence. I assess students in a course I havebeen teaching. Then I submit, upon request from the assess-ment team, the instruments or a description of the proce-dures and criteria I have used in assessing those students.I submit some sort of document that shows the assessmentteam what I have done in making those judgments. Thisdocument also includes the judgment that I have made onthat student. The assessment team then reviews a samplingof my decisions.

The assessment team members, once they delegatedthe authority, have to live with my decision at that time.They may revoke that authority in the future if I'm not livingup to what they think I should be doing in the assessmentarea. That's where the teeth come in controlling the assess-ment of students. Under the program the assessment teamreviews my work semester by semester. (At Mars Hill Col-lege we still have a largely semester-based calendar. Wedon't have a program where students start in at all differenttimes during the year).

The review process then may go into an appeals pro-cedure. A student may react to my assessment and say hedisagrees with it and wishes to have the decision changed.Each assessment team then has a written procedure whichthat student may follow in approaching the assessmentteam for redress. If the student says, "I challenge the as-sessment decision and I would like to discuss it and have itreviewed," the assessment team will then set up a hearing

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with the student, the teacher, and with whomever elseneeds to be present. If that doesn't satisfy the student, wehave a college appeals court, called the Academic AppealsCourt, made up of faculty, students, and one person from thecommunity. This court will determine whether or not to heara case appealed to them. If the court doesn't think it isworthy of appeal, it supports earlier decisions. If it hears thecase its decision stands as final in terms of a3sessment. Tothis point in the program we have not had any serious prob-lems over assessment. We have had some students come tothe assessment teams for review, but for the most partcases have been resolved at that level. We have not yethad to call in the all-college Academic Appeals Court.

Let me say a couple of things now about the competen-cy-based curriculum in terms of the priorities of the insti-tution. I tried to show that we put emphasis on taking gener-al competencies seriously. We always have taken the majorprograms with a great deal of seriousness but they are alsoundergoing redefinition in terms of competencies. The gen-eral competencies created the most problems in our insti-tution once it became visible that that was where the newenergies were being directed.

The competency-based curriculum seems to me to do

the following things:

First, it forces clarity of the curricular outcomes.There is no way to avoid that if you take the com-petency-based curriculum seriously. This task alone,as you can well imagine, took two-and-a-half yearsat our institution.

Second, it highlights the process dimensions of theeducational experience.

The latter element has been something that we did notfully anticipate. The facus on outcomes actually turnedattention to the process that students go through to get tothe outcomes. The results of the processes used by the col-

lege to educate students are now taken with a new serious-ness. We are directly concerned with whether Qi . Jt it worksin getting a student to the point of possessing the requiredcompetencie:.. We have become much more conscious ofthe processes that our students are going through and we arespending much tiMe and money now in redesigning thoseprocesses. This redesign includes, but is not limited to, di-.rect instruction. Besides direct classroom instruction thereare other planned activities in our learning experiences:formerly unrecognized activities that now receive a greatdeal of attention from the college, faculty activities whichin the past were considered of marginal significance, andactivities which faculty did over and above basic commit-ment to instruction, which was twelve semester hours ofteaching a semester. This concern with curricular, outcomes

forced a redistribution of faculty effqrt with more timegiven to counseling, advising, and assessing.

We found this emphasis on activities other than instruc-tion to be something of a problem at Mars Hill Collegebecause our faculty are very much interested in instruction.That's where they get their personal reward. It's very mean-ingful to them, and we have had to do a whole reeducationalphase in our program for the faculty so that they couldbegin to see that assessment, counseling, and advising areintegral parts of the educational process. We had to en-courage them to take instructionally related activities moreseriously and put more time and energy into those efforts.

One way we restructured to get at faculty change wasto redefine "faculty load." We took a "faculty load" andsaid that if you have a 12-month contract at our institution,

you have the equivalent of 42 units. If you take a 10-monthcontract you have 32 units. Every program, whether a gen-

eral or specialized competence area, could compute thenumber of units it would be working with. If it had threefull-time equivalent faculty appointed and two 10-monthfaculty, then it would be working with 190 units of faculty

time. This procedure doesn't solve the problems of excessdemands on faculty time, it just portions such time out andsets priorities on it.

The units that a faculty member is serving at the in-stitution are figured as follows: An assessment team facultymember can get up to two units a year for serving on anassessment team. (This was for the first year and we foundthat that was low and that we did not put enough weightinto the service of areas of assessment. Next year that willgo up to about four units.) If you are a chairperson in oneof these areas you can get up to about six units. A chair-person who works with a very small faculty in a very con-centrated way will not receive as many units as a chair-person who works with 15 or 20 faculty and maybe 400 or500 students in a given year. This process is extended to allactivities that have units awarded to them.

The actual competence area is responsible for decidinghow it wants to award those 190, or whatever, faculty unitsit has committed to itself. We didn't try to take into accounteverything the faculty member does. We didn't want to getinto the hang-up of, "I'm not going to do it unless I getunits for it." But what we did do is try to put some emphasisand priorities on the kinds of things that were to receivefaculty emphasis. If you read through the activities you willnote there is emphasis on the redesign and reworking ofcourses. If a faculty member is involved in course redesignthey get more units for such a course than a course that hasbeen repeatedly offered in the past. We recognize facultydirection of internships, independent study and directedreadings and set some approximate units on those to givefaculty credit in their workload for working with studentsin those ways. All of these are part of the effort to redesignand give visible emphasis to the important faculty activities.The competence curriculum, by forcing attention to curri-cular outcomes and the process dimensions, has led us intothis type of development of a redesigned faculty workload.

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We've also become acutely aware of the support pro-grams needed to develop a CB curriculum. (Figure 3.)Let me give an example. We have a mentor program in whichwe assess and diagnose our students for skill levels at entry.Under the old curriculum we were sending, by a referralapproach, about 75 students a year to a reading centerwhere they were working on a contract basis to developsome basic reading skills. When we began to systematicallydiagnose the whole freshman class with respect to theircompetence in communication skills, which has a readingcomponent, we found that over 200 of our freshmen actuallyneeded work in the area of reading. That's in a freshmanclass of 450! So we're giving half of the freshman classanywhere from a small to an extensive amount of work inreading skills.

We weren't prepared to handle such a number of stu-dents. Once we diagnosed them and said, "here is yourproblem and here is the competence you're required tohave," then we felt we were under obligation to providethe resources for them to develop the competencies. Thatmeant we had to turn more of our faculty effort, programmoney and our operating budget into areas supportive ofdeveloping reading competencies in students.

Additional areas became critical for us. We establishedan Evaluation Center with a full-time evaluation specialistto work with our faculty in designing effective evaluationprocedures for assessment of students. (Figure 4.) Wedeveloped a learning skills program which pulls togetherbasic compensatory work in math, English, tutoring, andcounseling. In the learning skills program we use our upper-level students on a contract basis to work with other stu-dents. But we also had to have professionals to staff theprogram.

I would like to call attention to another critical area.We found that enrichment was a major problem. The compe-

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FIGURE 4. EVALUATION CENTERFUNCTIONS

1. Develop processes and instruments for assessment ofstudents.

2. Provide resources for faculty development of expertisein assessment of student competence.

3. Design and carry-out institutional evaluation withemphasis on:

A. Impact of competence-based curriculum on Mars HillCollege environment.

B. Impact of competence-based curriculum on MarsHill College graduates, and

C. Cost accounting for competence-based curriculum.

tency-based program focuses on the minimum level of skillsrequired of students. We spend a great amount of time inworking with students to achieve those. We sensed a neglectof efforts to enrich students at the institution as they move onpast those minimal level skills. We have had to put some ofour faculty time and effort directly into that to stimulatesuch growth among our students.

The competency-based curriculum, once it's designed,looks like a pyramid which starts from the top and worksout in a deductive manner from the competence statement,

the evaluative criteria, to the learning experiences.The learning experiences have great variety in them. Nolonger can the student enter the institution and say, "Whatdo 1 taker There's no set of courses that a student takesat our institution. It depends upon his needs, interests, andhow he wants to proceed. Therefore, he has to have exten-sive advising and counseling.

We set up a mentor program. (Figure 5.) Faculty under

FIGURE 5. MENTOR PROGRAM

ORGANIZATIONEnrolls all new students. Mentor Groups - 15 students,

1 student mentor and 1 faculty mentor. Spans one academicyear.

PROGRAMOne orientation week prior to opening of school. Several

sessions over first semester to explore goal setting, decisionmaking, problem solving, and educational expections. Anintensive one semester personal development seminar.Academic planning and registration for first year.

OBJECTIVESTo provide new student a primary reference group. To

orient new student to college and curriculum. To assist stu-dent in exploration of self-knowledge and self-assessment.To lead student to generate a learning plan.

the mentor program work with new students over theirfirst year and receive the equivalent of one course in theirunit load. We carefully selected 30 out of 110 faculty towork in this program, which enrolls all new students. Theprogram spans the entry academic year at Mars Hill College.It starts with orientation one week prior to the openingof school. In that week much diagnosis of students is doneand students are led to explore different program compo-nents. Several sessions during the first semester exploregoal setting, decision making, problem solving, education-al expectations, and so forth. The objectives listed at thebottom of the previous list define the basic outcomes expect-ed from the mentor program.

In summary, the above description of the redesign ofthe organizational structure at Mars Hill College reflectsthe priorities that became apparent to us as we set our goals

very specifically in terms of a CBC. Ii was a major learningexperience for us.

After looking at a number of other programs and work-ing with a few colleges trying to do a similar kind of thing,I find that basic change is present in all of them. It doesrequire a rather extensive rethinking of management and or-ganization in order to achieve success in a CBC.

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V.

RENEWAL THROUGHCOMPETENCY-BASED EDUCATION:

FOR WHAT AND BY WHOM?

Lance C. Buhl

Too many people too often look at such movements ascompetency-based education, faculty development, or in-structional development as panaceas for the ills we face inhigher education. We need to do some reality testing of thisnotion of renewal. We must consider both sides of a singlecoin: competency-based education for what? and by whom?The progression of the following remarks mixes the respon-ses to both questions because of a basic reality. No matterhow we cut it, the fact is that for institutions to move pur-ponfully toward educational renewal places tremendousdemands on people to change. On faculty, more than on anyother actors in postsecondary education, falls the heaviestburden of the demand.

The premise of this paper is that faculty are the enginesof the academic enterprise. They are entrusted with the pri-mary responsibility to define, organize, monitor and eval-uate teaching. They may do that job poorly or well, but itis their job. Significant numbers of faculty, then, mustcommit themselves to changing the way they go about stim-ulating learning before student academic achievement andthe assessment of teaching and learning become somethingmore than haphazard. Competency-hged education holdsgreat potential for clarifying tIn teichingj learning processand, consequently, stimulatimg and messing fawning inpowerful ways. Faculty stamd to gain much by advting itspremises and adapting its teehniques. The point is thatunless faculty recognize the pottathal of,, and accept, !renew-

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al through competency-based education, it will not work.Our task, accordingly, is to answer the questions "forwhat?" and "by whom?" in ways that will convincea large number of faculty that moving to competency-basededucation is both intellectually justifiable and professionallyworthwhile.

The first question is fundamental. It is a question abouteducational values. When writing my thesis in Americandiplomatic history, I was concerned to explore the attitudesand behaviors congressmen exhibited toward the Americannavy immediately after the Civil War. Impressive was thenumber of times principal actors in Congress raised theissue, "a navy for what?" The question, both implicitlyand explicitly stated, informed the way congressmen wentabout making legislative decisions. In the same criticalvein, we ought to ask the question, "competency-basededucation for what?" It suggests a number of prDvocativesub-questions: Who stands to benefit? In what ways? Whowill lose? Each calls for a reasonable answer.

The competency-based educational model is one thatfits well within the context of the traditional, rationalistapproach to teaching and learning in higher education.It does not call for a revolution at all. When we look ateducation critically, we simply have to conclude that com-petencies have always been the goal of our teaching. Wesimply went about asking for and assessing competencieswithout any great awareness about the true nature of theprocess. Probe your own educational training. How didyou become a historian, physicist, artist, or political scien-tist? How did your professors gain any indication that youshould join their ranks? Don't stretch for answers. Examinethe nature of what you did to demonstrate your abilities(i.e., competencies) to function with the language and mod-els of inquiry peculiar to the discipline. Turn the issuearound. How do you know when your students are learn-ing? The answer is that they are progressing the more they

sound like you do when they respond to demands you makeon them for some accounting tests, class questions, pro-jects. The more they practice observing correctly the rulesof methodological inquiry and of logical, plausible and lit-erate argumentation about disciplinary problems, the closerthey are to being educated. Education is, in fact, a trainingprocess. Does this connection simplify, demean or cheapencollegiate education? No. If we look closely, for example,at the rules we advance about logical, plausible and literateargumentation in the discipline, we notice that they callfor a great many sophisticated cognitive skills.

To repeat, the issue is not revolution. It is a matter ofdoing what we in fact do with greater awareness and clarity.Ours is a public profession; we have a real obligation to de-fine what the educational process is. Teaching for learninginvolves publicizing the nature of minimally acceptablecompetencies. In part, this obligation requires that we speci-fy what we hope the students will be able to do at the end ofa course or curriculum. We should let students know what wevalue and what they are expected to become as educatedpersons. Competency-based education rests avowedly on thespecification of our values and our goals, course by courseand curriculum by curriculum.

If you read only one book on higher education, I wouldrecommend that it be Arthur Chickering's Education andIdentity, (Jossey-Bass, 1969). Look at those chapters onobjectives, size of institution, and role of faculty and ad-ministration. Though Chickering nowhere uses the phrase,there exists no better statement of a rationale for competen-cy-based education. He talks very clearly about the impor-tance of specification. Indeed, his research indicates thatthose colleges which seem to have the greatest influenceon their students are institutions that have the clearest ideaof what they are about and are able to say so in a meaning-ful public way.

The rest of what we are about as teachers flows from

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specification. The materials we select, the classwork, thehomework or other activities that we organize, the tests thatwe construct, the feedback mechanisms we develop, and theevaluations we make flow from specification. Out of thatflow we can answer the question "for what?" We canbegin to define the way to convince professors that compe-tency-based education is useful and necessary.

Competency-based education opens the possibilityfor insuring the realization of the values we promise. Again,look to Chickering. He talks about values in terms of sevenvectors of student achievement which are related as a groupto producing men and women competent to function in apluralistic society. They are competent in those tasks re-quired of the citizen in a democratic nation and in thoseskills requisite for earning a living. Each of us can say some-thing about the cognitive and affective skills we value. Allof us who are talking about liberal education, or about teach-er education or some other form of training' can define,through processes of consensual interaction, a set of edu-cational values that we can all live with.

Competency-based education takes us a step beyondvalue clarification toward the true democratization of highered .mtion. We have talked a great deal about the demo-cratic revolution in higher education since World War II,but, as Patricia Cross reminds us in Beyond the OpenDoor (1971), that has been a revolution only in access tothe classroom. Competency-based education will be theengine for moving that revolution past access and on tolearning. It will do so because it increases the probabilitythat most of our students wil! achieve the educational ob-jectives we set. Higher education traditionally has concen-trated its resources on successful students. Those 20 percent are going to succeed no matter what we do. We oughtto organize the bulk of our energies on behalf of that groupin the middle the 60 per cent or 70 per cent to whom weare content to assign the "gentleman's C." By focusing

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on the critical and diverse learning needs of all studentsthrough competency-based education we will achieve whattruly is learner-centered reform.

There promises to be a significant professional by-product in adopting competency-based education. Theevaluative challenge we feel so clearly these days will nolonger be avoided out of ignorance and concern about thepaucity of data on learning. The evaluative challenge will bejoined with sufficient data and with some confidence thatwe are doing a good job, that we can have influence on learn-ing, and that we can chart the impact of different instruc-tional strategies on learning outcomes.

To recapitulate, the answer to the question "compe-tency-based education for what?" is that it significantlyincreases the likelihood that higher education will effect therealization .of the values and skills requisite to a free societyin the majority of students.

We turn to the question of "competency-based educationby whom?" We're back again to the individual professor.Let's not deny or devalue the responsibility either of thestudent or the administrator for academic achievement.Ultimately, of course, student learning is the proof for anyeducational method. If the student is really disinterestedin learning or absolutely incapable of it, and we can deter-mine that with certainty, then he or she can be held respon-sible for his or her own failure. As analysis below indicates,academic administrators bear a real obligation to insure asupportive environment for teaching and learning. But indefining, organizing, monitoring and evaluating studentlearning, the faculty play a more decisivt role than otheractors.

Fixing responsibility only begins to answer the question"by whom?" We must also convince faculty that it is pos-sible to act to increase learning and teaching effectivenessthrough the competency-based approach. We can start

by assuring them that the technologies for renewal alreadyexist. Enough is known and available about how to opera-tionalize the approach to move ahead in any curriculum.This seems simple-minded to many because of the allegeddifficulties in defining competencies. In fact this is a "non-problem." We arrive at the statement and assessment ofcompetencies through the process of consensual interactionamong peers in the discipline. We do so by stating expectedminimal, but respectable, competencies in tentative ways,looking to the teaching/learning transaction as the experi-mental forum for testing the sufficiency and reasonable-ness of such statements. Hence, we begin to develop dataabout whether the hypothesis about trainable cornpetenciesneeds restatement. In the spirit of the Pragmatic Traditionwe must suspend our almost frantic desire to know withabsolute certainty that we can state all competencies andstate them meaningfully. We're simply not going to knowwith absolute certainty:. We have to rely, like lawyers, onthe preponderance of evidence that we generate and or-ganize.

What this means is that we should go about structuringteaching and learning situations in the same way we goabout structuring our own research. We construct hypothe-ses that are geared to problems of the discipline and weestablish experimental situations to test those hypotheses.We gather relevant data; we draw reasonable conclusionsabout the adequacy of the hypotheses; we generalize asbest we can, and we recycle the process.

It is neither my intention nor my task to review all thetechniques that are relevant. It simply bears repeatingthat there exists a sufficient number of them to begin im-mediately. If we have the will, we can define those compe-tencies we are interested in teaching toward with reasonableclarity.

This gets us back to our predicament. If the values and

advantages of competency-based education are clear and iftechnology exists for using it, then why is it that facultydon't leap to awareness with joy, enthusiasm, and humility?In part, they haven't been convinced or haven't receiveda clear message that all this is possible. Even if we areprepared to do the job of convincing, however, there's stillanother problem. Do faculty really want to be convinced?And, if they are convinced, why should they act on thisnew conviction about education?

The answer lies in an examination of the professor inthe institutional environment. For all of the weaknesses ofa straw man argument, there is some advantage to sketch-ing a typical situation. Let's assume that the average pro-fessor is convinced of the values of competency-based edu-cation. We have captured his or her interest by making theconnection between research in the discipline and researchin the classroom. She or he sees that the paradigm isn't real-ly different and is prepared to say that it looks like an inter-esting and fruitful way to achieve the values she or he es-teems. So far, so good. But what does it mean to proceed?It means, first, significant retraining as a classroom prac-titioner. She or he must be retrained in various teachingtechnologies. Then, she or he finds that there are signifi-cant adjustments that must be made in the way she or herelates to colleagues, to students, to administrators and otherstaff. These are significant alterations. She or he discoversthat it will be necessary to make new demands on adminis-trators and colleagues for support.

Yet, what does a professor typically face? The short ofit is that she or he confronts a void of positive reinforcers.Students resent being asked to operate in a different way.That resentment is fertile ground for negative responses.It's not pleasant to discover a new approach to education,and with enthusiasm, to spring it on students only to findthat they strongly resist. They were comfortable with themore passive educational routine. This new approach asks

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them to work harder than they're going to have to workin other courses.

A professor is seldom reinforced by his or her colleaguesfor new educational ventures. The profession has effective-ly adopted a vow of silence about teaching. It's difficultto talk about the problems one encounters in the classroom,or the nice things that happen, or the ways we've had tochange. "Innovators" threaten other faculty. There's a gen-eral unwillingness to support instructors for promotion,tenure, and other considerations based on teaching compe-tence. There is an unwillingness to regard any data aboutteaching competence as meaningful because we're not will-ing to measure and value it as we do research. We operatein research out of the pragmatic tradition where all conclu-sions are tentative. We operate in teaching out of an abso-lutist tradition where all conclusions must be axiomatic andirrevocable.

Administrators, of course, have scarce resources. Theycompound the problem by distributing them randomly.They don't make decisions about professional support interms of any particularly well-identified series of goals andobjectives around teaching effectiveness. They have alimited sense of the range of reinforcers that are possiblefrom social support to decisions about promotion and tenure.

So, the average professor is caught in a trap of severelycompeting values. She or he has strong needs for esteem,for respect and for a decent self-image. These are personal,immediate, and real. They're more important than secondaryvalues, such as the wish to see most of his or her studentssucceed. She or he may have them for 16 weeks at a time.She or he has her/himself for a somewhat longer period.

In all, the average professor has a value set that saysteaching is his or her real, fundamental mission. This is, byall catalog statements, the assumed universal understandingabout the chief goal of higher education. In practice, how-

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ever, the agreement is betrayed and the values confused bystudents, colleagues, and administrators.

The fundamental question we're bound to pose, oncewe've said that teaching and learning are the most impor-tant missions of any institution is, "so, what?" How doesthe statement about mission help us to make determinationsthat are relevant to a faculty member's life and professionaldevelopment? What we say makes little difference to him orher if, in fact, she or he is reduced to finding only intrinsicpersonal rewards in everything she or he does.

The corrective to this discouraging set of conditionsis that we must manipulate environmental factors so thatfaculty will find opting for competency-based educationpersonally and professionally rewarding. A colleague andI have constructed an institutional assessment and planningmodel which, we believe, can generate useful data aboutthose environmental factors that impact teaching and learn-ing. The model identifies five keys or sets of factors whichdetermine the probabilities that teaching and learning willbe effective. The first has to do with the willingness of theinstitution to state its goals for teaching effectiveness inclear, behaviorally meaningful terms over a given period ofyears. The next four factors concern the steps that are nec-essary to realize those goal statements: the allocation of thetime of a critical mass of faculty to those activities likely toincrease teaching/learning effectiveness; the orgariizationof sufficient administrative support, in policy and practice,for the efforts of those faculty; the securing of peer supportfor their work; and the definition of those teaching prac-tices deemed by researchers in teaching and learning to con-tribute most clearly to enhancing conditions of learning formost students.

The word "manipulation" has been used to describewhat must be done to improve the conditions for teachingfor faculty. It is a conscious choice. Frankly, the alterna-tive denying any influence on or responsibility for, the de-

cisions faculty make with regard to teaching and learninghas worn thin. The fact is that in higher education we arein the business of changing people. But, say you, "Myvalues and the values of Western Civilization stand againstany manipulation of individuals. I prize freedom. You seemto be suggesting a sort of slavery within academe." Thereaction is typical and worth serious response.

Let's consider the issue in its proper context. Ask your-self these questions: Am I not involved in manipulatingsomething when I opt as a teacher for some format forlearning, competency-based or otherwise? Are we notmanipulating at least the conditions for learning in orderthat students will tend to behave in certain ways and not inothers? Do I not manipulate some crucial dimension of acolleague's decision-making when I offer him or her myassistance and support or oppose his or her tenure case be-cause of his or her unusual work in a novel form of instruc-tion? As an administrator, do I not manipulate faculty byencouraging them to opt for competency-based education,then withhold my support for them at critical personneljunctures? What do I make of the fact that, even if I denythat I play any manipulative role, my colleagues believe thatmy acts contributed either to increasing, stabilizing ordecreasing their range of options? If I deny any responsi-bility for defining that range of options, where do I acceptany responsibility for anybody, for the realization of anyvalues, for anything with human consequence in highereducation?

Personally, I admit to owning a large sense of respon-sibility. I value competency-based education for the promiseit holds for student learning. I value satisfactory profession-al growth for faculty. I want to exercise some manipulatoryinfluence on environments, events, and people in highereducation in order to ensure that both values are realized.I will act publicly, and with accountable regard for theethics of the liberal tradition. (I also value civil rights and

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civil liberties and believe they are fit for governing the in-ternal life of educational institutions.) I believe that wemust do all that we can within that tradition to influencethe arrangement of environmental factors that reinforcefaculty in their commitment to a useful and decent educa-tional program. What is best about competency-based edu-cation is that it turns over to both students and facultytrue responsibility and real freedom to find an increasedrange of options for education in a democratic society.

VI.

HOW DO YOU CHANGEPROFESSOR FUDD?

Robert E. Knott

A considerable amount of change has occurred at MarsHill College over the past several years. As you probably areaware, we established a competence-based curriculum. Weviewed the CB curriculum as a means of facilitating thatchange by stating the priorities of the instructional programin terms of specific outcomes, and encouraging change tooccur toward realization of those outcomes.

Change is continually occurring in most people, facultyincluded. A basic management concern is directing thatchange. From an institutional perspective when thinking ofdirecting change one has to conceptualize the direction ofchange that is desired. A second basic question to be ans-wered has to do with the extent that faculty participate inshaping particular institutional changes. Since faculty par-ticipation is critical to lasting and effective educationalchanges I want to lay out three basic principles on which Ithink a faculty development program should be organizedand then give you some specific examples of each of them.

The first one is the principle of personal meaning. Last-ing change in a professor is directly related to the degree ofpersonal meaningfulness that new roles have for that pro-fessor. The second principle is organizational clarity. Lastingchanging is fostered or inhibited by the degree to which theorganizational structures of the institution are made clearand are consistent with curricular goals and program intent.There must be consistency between structures, goals, andcontent. The third basic principle involves institutionalrewards. Institutional rewards must recognize and support

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change in desired directions. These three principles affectthe extent and scope of institutional and personal change,change that is meaningful in helping professors adapt orbecome more able in what they're doing.

Let's look at the first, personally meaningful change.A professor must have the opportunity to shape and designthe curriculum from the outset. It doesn't have to be agrassroots movement, but faculty certainly need to involvethemself in a personally meaningful way very early in thechange process.

Second, there has to be an opportunity to select theareas of the curriculum where one can make the most viablecontributions. Faculty members sense that they do somethings well and other things poorly. Faculty generally wish

to either work on present strengths in order to develop ormaintain them or to examine their weaknesses and bringparticular talents to bear in overcoming them. Differentfaculty will choose different options. So the curriculum thatis competence-based provides the opportunity for a profes-sor to begin to be personally involved early by saying, "Hereis where I think I can make the greatest contribution tohelping students move toward particular competencies."

Third, the program design must raise the professor'sawareness of strengths and weaknesses that he or she haswith respect to the goals set by the institution. Let me sharewith you a set of tasks that comprise our faculty developmentprogram. (See Figure 1.) Examine the first task. In ourins.tion we have seven basic competences which we ex-pect students to possess. Professors choose the competencearea in which they want to work. After they choose an areathey become a part of a larger faculty contracted to thatprogram. The contract states explicitly the program areas inwhich any faculty will be working.

The first thing the faculty member has to do upon se-lecting an area is demonstrate that he or she has that

FIGURE 1. FACULTY DEVELOPMENTPROGRAM TASKS

1. Faculty Achievement of Required College Competence.

2. Development of Instructional - Counseling/Advising -Evaluaeional Skills Necessary to Assist Students inAchieving the Competence.

3. Identification of Needs of Faculty.

4. Planning and Execution of Faculty DevelopmentProgram Around Identified Needs.

competence. Often the faculty member must do considerablework before he or she is able to demonstrate the compe-tence.

After demonstrating the competence the second re-quirement of faculty is to examine the skills of instruction,counseling, advising and evaluation which .are necessary inorder to assist the students in attaining the competence.Now that a faculty member can recognize the competencein him or herself, how does one teach for it? How does onecounsel, teach and assess for students possession of it?

The analysis of necessary skills leads to identificationof the developmental needs of each faculty member. Facultystate their needs directly based upon their own self-assess-ment. Now the administration has to commit itself to assistfaculty in developing needed skills. The administration atMars Hill College had to generate over $400,000 to supportfaculty change over the past two years. On the basis of thosethree principles, we planned at Mars Hill College a compre-hensive faculty development program for a year at a timebased around the identified needs of particular faculty. Itis a collective program and each competence area has itsfaculty needs stated so there has to be a provision of abun-dant initial support for both personnel and material needs.

Even after faculty perceived needs are met, there remaindifficulties. The greatest difficulty that we've encounteredin carrying out the faculty development program at MarsHill is organizational clarity. For curricular reform to be suc-cessful, there has to be a focusing of the faculty energies onwell-defined tasks. Otherwise, faculty shift energies fromtask to task without gaining a sense that they have com-pleted anything. They've begun many worthwhile projectsbut haven't had any real satisfaction that any of them issuccessful. That means, in terms of programs, that realisticdemands have to be placed on time and efforts of facultysd that renewal occurs with some sense of accomplishment.We at Mars Hill have had to redesign total faculty respon-sibilities so we actually recognize faculty who are gettinginto the design of new programs by giving them credit forreform activities.

Another element that I think is critical to the successof changing faculty behavior, is a thorough review of theanxiety producing elements which cause faculty to with-draw from the tasks before them. Below are discussed someissues which raise anxiety among members of an academicorganization.

One of the major contributors to anxiety is non-clarityin organizational structure where one doesn't really knowwhere or for what the rewards come. Another consequenceof lack of organizational clarity is confusion as to the extentthat the administration is genuinely behind the effoxts atreform.

Assuming the elements most productive of anxiety areaddressed, one should remember that dynamic tension be-tween the present development of the faculty member andthe goals of the institution must not be removed. The reduc-tion of anxiety is not the same thing as the elimination oftension. The curricular goals of the competency-based curri-culum at Mars Hill have ureated that source of tension.Joseph Schwab speaks to this point. "That kind of faculty

movement will only arise if tough administrators providemodels of what is needed. Provide those models over theheads of present faculty and then drag the rest of the facultykicking and screaming to witness what those models do andwhat their rewards are." I do not pretend that this will beeasy. I do not pretend that it will be peaceful, but I do sayit is necessary. In my experience I have found no alterna-tive to the provision of successful models for professors andstudents. That's one way of creating the source of dynamictension.

Another necessary item is a realistic reward system.There has to be institutional recognition of faculty effortsto develop their skills in the direction of successfully imple-menting the curriculum. At Mars Hill we set aside for nextyear $35,000 to be used solely as faculty requested. This isin addition to that bulk of money that goes into the ongoingfaculty development program. The $35,000 is to be usedjust to reward people who want to involve themselves inactivities in addition to those set-out in the faculty develop-ment program.

In addition, there is a faculty development committeeat Mars Hill which is responsible for making recommenda-tions to the administration on tenure, promotion, and meritincreases. The faculty development committee drew-upcriteria for recognition which are consistent with the newcompetence-based programs so that faculty members whoare most active in the new program will meet more of thecriteria for these kinds of institutional rewards than faculty'who are not.

For the administration this means you have to have putyour money where your faculty is supposed to be. I see noother successful way. Otherwise faculty will quite rightlyperceive that the administration is not strongly supportiveof reform. This is where I think educational leadership andgeneral statesmanship are important in working with faculty.

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Another important element in a sound reward system is

the flexibility to respond to personal needs as they arise.Faculty who are working day after day in the "nitty-gritty"of getting a program going need an outlet. Give the facultymember a chance to get away and participate in a confer-ence or a program of his or her choosing. Give him or her re-lief simply to reflect from a non-involved distance for amonth or semester. Give him or her a chance to read a paperwhich describes what they are trying to do. They then be-come a defender of the new enterprise. Faculty often comeback with more experience, ready to tackle problems withnew enthusiasm. This is partly because they have developeda different perspective on what they were doing. They areusually reinforced in their activities even if they encountersome severe questions from others. They come back havingthought more broadly about their goals. The flexibility andmoney to meet those kinds of needs should be present.

In summary, I think a successful faculty developmentprogram has to reflect a sense of personal involvement onthe part of the faculty member or the change will not be last-ing in his or her behavior. Second, the organization hasto be clear in that it is designed to bring about the changesthat it has set for itself as institutional goals. Being specificin stating those institutional outcomes, particularly of fac-ulty and their behavior, is part of organizational clarity.Third, the reward system must be one which is clearly sup-portive of the changes that you hope to have occur and whichthe faculty have played a part in shaping.

VII.

IMPLEMENTING COMPETENCY-BASEDEDUCATION: "CRITICAL THINKING

ISN'T A COMPETENCY?"

Mark A. Schlesinger

The competency-based education movement -- and onecan indeed call it that now is flourishing. In the blush ofexcitement that characterizes many germinal, promisingmovements, one can find competencies stated in career orjob specific terms, discipline-mastery terms, and supra-disciplinary terms (the so called "generic," or transferable,competencies such as critical thinking, communication, valueclarification, and problem solving).

To its great credit, the competency movement is not ahuckstering one. The overall issues involved in compe-tency-based instruction are approached with a proper senseof respect; I think one can even detect a presentiment ofawe among some competency-based practitioners. It is nosmall task to define and operationalize what our bulletinshave always said we do anyway.

There is a modern parable that illustrates this definitionproblem. It is the story of the corporate executive who oneday swept his desk clean, resigned his position, went home,kissed his family goodbye, and embarked upon an unchartedjourney to discern the meaning of life. Several months laterour erstwhile corporate executive was climbing a jaggedHimalayan peak in a snowstorm, 50 pounds thinner, clothingin tatters. He happened upon an aged man in a flowingwhite robe, eyes deep with transcendent wisdom, sitting inthe lotus position.

He said to this man: "0 Great One, they told me in thevillage that you could help me. I have been searching for themeaning of life. I will not rest until I find it."

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The wise old man shifted his gaze benevolently to hisunexpected guest and with arms spreading outward he halfwhispered, "Life . . is a fouzitain."

The executive toyed with the phrase "life is a fountain,"tried voicing it once or twice, and in exasperation asked,"Is that all?"

"That is all."

The ! pupil th.fmJght some i -Jre, and finally burst out inan undlrstandable relapse into corporate jargon: "Thatwon't wash. I've invested time and money in this search.I've given up my job, I've left my family, I've nearly starved,and I've traveled half way amund the world, only to hear youtell me that life is a fountain! You've gotta be crazy."

Thereupon a long silence, after which the Gre:ct Manextended his arms to the shoulders of the seeker, gazed in-credulously into his eyes, and said, "Life . . ;sn't a foun-tain?"

Competencies in the curriculum a.it the equivalentof a long sought fountain. Col!eges and their faculties havesacrificed money, time, and energy in the pursuit. Yet, tothe extent we sit in one position, settled on our mountaintops with our competency constructs, we shall be vulnerableto the practitioner, the researcher, the business person orindustrialist, the legislator, the parent, or the curious butsupposedly naive freshmanall to whom we may somedayhave to respond: "Critical thinking . . . isn't a competencyr

The implementation issue is not one that can be re-solved, or even broached, without careful consideration ofother issues, particularly the rationale for implementation,its systemic consequences, and the means by which "suc-cess" is determined. All of this may be a truism that hardlyneeds restating. Yet, there is a corollary that seems moreelusive; that corollary states that the object of implemen-tation cannot and should not be final. We can't relax when

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we've taken our university or college or program from pointA to point B. If success is to follow, continuous reappraisaland redefinition is mandatory.

In this sense, the college curriculum itself is best seenas an insoluble problem. The ideal of solving it need not beabandoned; in fact, that ideal is more closely approximatedby behavior which accepts, and indeed glories in, the prob-lematic nature of education. Heifer lin once quoted F. M.Cornford to depict academia's attitude of resistence tochaiige: "Nothing should ever be done for the first time."When curricular change agents are able to outflank thisattitude, we might add: "Nothing should ever be done forthe last time."

Let us treat implementation not as a step by step, one-shot, program-mounting activity, but as a continually re-cycling one. I shall be talking mostly in terms of "genericcompetencies," those supra-disciplinary, transferable capa-bilities that a liberal arts undergraduate education can con-ceivably address.

What is unique about CBE, and how does thataffect its implementation?

The overriding distinction of competency-based educa-tion is its attempt to define and operationalize the outcomesof learningnot simply how they are measured, but whatthey are. The whole notion of "competency" implies thatthe prevailing curricular outcomes, as well as our measure-ment of those outcomes, are fair game.

This perspective differs quite significantly from theassumptions implicit in many other types of learner-centeredreform. These reform types are frequently directed towardthe process, rather than the outcomes, of higher education.It may be oversimplistic to state that these reforms consti-tute merely a repackaging of the same old thing; but the lit-erature on the Personalized System of Instruction, Com-

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p -Assisted Instruction, Programmed Instruction, evenindependent and interdisciplinary studies, largely fails toilluminate the overall outcomes of higher education. In anunderstandable bow to prevailing norms in evaluation ofedu-cational effectiveness, these reforms are often justified onwhat we once thought were simply measures of education,but which now have come to represent, accurately or inac-curately, the "outputs" of traditional education. The pri-niary dependent variable in research on PSI, for example,is content masteryeither norm- or criterion-referenced.The latter, in which universal minimum standards are set,is somewhat akin to the competency approach (and, indeed,is referred to by many as "competency-based education");however, the "competency" may be little more than a newway of demonstrating "he remembered his facts."

The attempt to shift the curriculum to competency mode

must be viewed in a largely different light. It need not be arepackaging; it need not be just another wrinkle on the cur-ricular elephant hide. lt may involve many processes. To live

up to its promise, it must involve a set of implementingassumptions and strategies that recognize the current andever-existing problematic nature of higher education'soutcomes.

Faculty-Administrator interaction. The fact that edu-cational innovators continually speak of the college depart-ment in terms analogous to an impenetrable fortress doesnot lessen the accuracy of that observation, One envisionsthe advocate of generic competencies trying to scale the walls

of Fortress Sociologica, Fortress Scientifica, Fortress Hu-manitas, and so on, only to be reduced to catapulting stones

or epithets in their direction. Put more tersely: how do youget the committed disciplinarian to think of basic, life-longcapabilities that transcend his or her discipline?

The problem is doubly difficult: on the one hand, facul-

ty participation is essential in implementing CBE; on theother hand, the notion of generic competencies which trans-

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cend disciplinary considerations is hardly one to encouragesuch participation.

Broad faculty participation is essential, perhaps to aunique extreme in CBE implementation, b !cause ofagainthe basic rationale for CBE. If the goals of higher educationare viewed as problematic and requiring extensive revisionastance implied by CBEthe chief purveyors of higher edu-cation must 1) realize the problem; and 2) be involved intesting solutions to the problem. In the vernacular, it istheir baby. Additionally, CBE involves constructs that re-main largely hypothetical and unvalidated. We thereforeneed the informed perspectives of the disciplinesand notjust the behavioral sciencesto define what we mean bycritical thinking; or how sciences, for example, clarify self-held values or the values of others; or what problems incommunication are engendered by our technology.

The disciplinary fortresses may be penetrable. Duringcease-fire negotiations, the CBE advocate can point out thatsupra-disciplinary does not mean non-disciplinary. It is

not inconsistent to believe simultaneously in the integrityof the disciplines and the validity of generic, transferablecapabilities. Every discipline, conceivably, can addressevery competency; critical thinking, for example, need notand should not be the domain solely of the symbolic logiciansin math or philosophy. In fact, the notion of generic com-petencies invites the possibility of spreading the wealth;it may be a boon to certain departments whose existence iscurrently threatened.

Other common ground may be stressed. At BowlingGreen, this common ground is the sense of frustration thatmany of our faculty experience with our current generaleducation mission, or lack of it. We have come to prize thefaculty member who has sensed anomalies in that missionand who wants to investigate just what he or she is doingthat will be of long term benefit to the student.

C.n liege and the "Real World." The competency move-ment also provides a unique opportunity for the universityto cooperate in a dynamze fashion with the outside world.If we are going to make claims for the future utility of thecapabilities we deem important for our students, we mustascertain the relevance of these capabilities to business,industry, leisure life, professional life, and so on. It might beunreasonable to expect such assessment to occur across theboard, prior to mounting competency-based programs.Even in the CBE programs that specifically address one ca-reer area, such as CBTE, the entire field can not be combed.Yet, the intention to define what we mean by "success" inlater life, how that success is attained, and how we know itis attainedthat intention is one that should be explicit.Equally explicit should be our intent to consider these mat-ters as part of a continual reforming of that which is initiallyimplemented.

The interaction between academics and non-academicsis not so problematic in the professional field as it is in theliberal arts. Many, perhaps most, college instructors in theprofessions are or have been practitioners. They embodythe desired linkage between academia and the outside.And the competencies they seek to help their studentsattain frequently are relatively straightforward performancecapabilities.

We've found from personal experience that the bridgebetween the liberal arts and the "outside" is not so easilyconstructed. There is a reservoir of distrust, for example,between college and corporation. This distrust is not lessenedby academic humanists approaching corporate heads andasking: "What can I do to help prepare my students to beeffective in your corporation? What do you think of criticalthinking?" Again, common needs must be emphasized. Theuniversity seeks to help its students achieve productive adultlives. The corporation seeks a productivity of its own. Theacademic's knee-jerk reaction to that kind of productivity

has been that it has no relevance to the college curriculum.Who wants to assist students to become l3.dder-climbers,money-grubbers, hard-nosed corporate execut:ves, charac-ters in search of an Arthur Hai ley novel?

There is abundant evidence that corporations them-selves do not necessarily seek such characters. There is fur-ther evidence, most of it prescriptive or anecdotal, thatthose who do well in corporations possess certain capa-bilities that we have hardly defined and for which we havelittle or no validated measurement. An example might besensitivity to the non-verbal components of interpersonalcommunication; or "creativity;" or problem-solving acumen.

There is danger here that has echoes from the past.You remember Clark Kerr's "federal grant multiversity"in which the university was viewed as the servant to theneeds of other societal institutions. You may also rememberRobert Paul Wolff's rejoinder to the Kerr model. Volff'sconcern was that the university separate societal "needs"from "wants." There is a curious polarity in the history ofhigher education's relationship to the outside world. On theone hand, colleges and universities have designed pro-grams in isolation from that world, simultaneously makingclaims for the real-world utility of those programs. On theother hand, and this more clearly approximates the Kerrmodel, colleges and universities have in effect said: "tellus what you want; give us the money, and we'll put it togeth-er for you." It seems to me that neither operating model hasresulted in effective preparation of our students for laterlife.

My greatest .fear for the CBE movement is that thesetwo approaches will once again evince themselves. It neednot happen, as the opportunity for interaction between col-lege and the outside, in which neither party is passive, isbecoming more apparent. The fact that corporations arebecoming interested, coupled with the blooming of the com-

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petency movement, provides an opportunity that must beexciting to all who have evinced frustration with currentconceptions of educational outcomes and their utility in laterlife.

Implementation issues implied by institutionaltype and size.

We turn now to a consideration of how implementationproblems differ between small colleges and large univer-sities. As it did when we considered institutional roles, therationale for CBE provides a natural starting point. Itinforms issues of climate and faculty predisposition, auto-nomy, and communication as they relate to implementingCBE.

"Climate" and faculty predisposition. Earlier, we notedthat CBE is in large part an effort to define and operation-alize what our bulletins have always said we do anyway.This assertion is perhaps more apt in describing small liberalarts colleges than in describing large universities or liberalarts colleges contained therein. Let me cite an example fromthe bulletin of a small, private midwestern liberal artscollege:

The educational process is concerned with theintellectual, spiritual, cultural, social, and physi-cal development of each student and seeks toprepare him adequately for the responsibilitiesof life itself as well as for leadership and service

in the modern world.

Other bulletins may speak of "24-hour living and learn-ing experiences," facilitating the actualization of self andthe attainment of successful interpersonal relationships,developing communication and reasoning capability, andso forth. We can play a game here that is interestingfor aminute or so at least. That game is to take such bulletinstatements and derive a competency for each. State that

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competency in behavioral terms, and then begin to thinkabout levels of attainment within the competency, themeans of achieving competence, and the evaluation of com-petence. It gets more complicated. But to the extent a col-lege has a tradition, a self-conscious image which somehowinforms the behavior of its faculty, administration, and stu-dents; and so long as that tradition involves, at least in theabstract, a devotion to the developmental aspects of thewhole person, such a college is greatly advantaged in con-structing and implementing a CBE program. The rationaleis already there. The fact that full-blown competency pro-grams in the liberal arts currently exist mainly at such smallcolleges is illustrative.

One can cite examples of small colleges where large-scale changes have been effected by a relatively small, co-hesive group of highly motivated individuals; these individ-uals have written grant proposals, brought the issues to ap-propriate councils, and overseen the implementation of re-form. The faculty, faced with diminishing enrollments,fluctuation in preeminence of individual departments, andlimited employment opportunities elsewhere, may grumble.But when reform is couched in terms of survival, its short-term success is enhanced.

Its long-term success is another matter. Very often,approval in principle does not connote approval in fact ora whole-hearted commitment to that which is approved.Size also becomes important. It is one thing to say that50 per cent of your music and art faculty supports the reformand is willing to reallocate faculty load in terms of, say,non-disciplinary, problem-oriented centers. It is anotherthing to note that you have four faculty members in musicand art.

While the undergraduate college of a large universitymay not be ideally situated to effect total program change,it has more freedom to allocate faculty time by virtue of therelative numbers of its faculty members who are wholly

committed to the reform in question. The issue then shiftsto the degree of autonomy central administration or appro-priate councils are willing to grant these innovators.

Autonomy: justifying the reform and placing it in itslarger context. Those responsible for shifting an entire col-lege curriculum to a new mode may sense an imperative toevaluate that shift, either for their own purposes (i.e., tojustify the shift to themselves) or because it is a requirementof a granting agency. Their counterparts who have effectedreform in part of a university curriculum are compelled toevaluate themselves for others within the university. Thisevaluation may be in terms of the performance and motiva-tion of students, the attitudes of faculty, and other suchvariables that inform the curricular process. These variablesmay bear no relationship to the reform at hand: how rele-vant is it to compare the grades of Bowling Green's LittleCollege students (who have been exposed to an intensivecritical thinking and communication learning sequence)with those of non-Little College students? An innovationmust frequently be justified in terms of an educational styleit is attempting to counter.

The issue of relative human and financial costs mustalso be borne by university-based innovators in terms com-parative to extant programs. Such evaluation may also occur,of course, at the small college whose total program has beenreformed, but the reform itself is not an issue only how thatreform is practiced in subsectors of the college. In the uni-versity, the justification is for the reform itself.

The justification of CBE programs which exist side byside with "traditional" ones is not aided by the fact thatsuch innovative programs require specialization in certainmaintenance, adaptive, and manageriP.I functions. B9wlingGreen's University Division of General Studies, beatitse ofthe different nature of its programs, must have its own eval-uation specialist and student counselor. It would lie unrea-sonable to expect these duties to be assumed by an insti-.

tutional research office or the student affairs wing, respec-tively. Both agencies serve needs and interests that are moreglobal, and have neither the time, the money, nor the man-power to assume new tasks appropriate for the variousinnovative ventures sustained by a single university. On theface of it, then, reform structures such as the UniversityDivision may be accused of adding duplication and man-power waste in an era when excesses are to be frownedupon.

Finally, innovative programs within universities mustassure students that they are not in a cul-de-sac. Equiva-lencies between innovative and traditional programs mustbe articulated so that students can flow easily between theseprograms. And when the innovation involves somethingas untried as a competency construct, it must declare theseequivalencies in a relative vacuum. The following passage,culled from Bowling Green's Modular Achievement Pro-gram (MAP) 1972-73 Summary Report, illustrates thisdifficulty:

Under ideal circumstances, achievement criteriaand levels of competency would be defined onlyafter they were known to be fundamental predic-tors of human performance. Without such data,MAP was virtually left to produce a new set ofcriteria and to experiment with its usefulness.While willing to do this, MAP has not been willingto endanger the future academic career &students;thus it has taken the approach that it would onlydefine a set of competencies that students shouldhold, but would also guarantee that this set wouldinclude proven competence in traditionally definedareas. it was MAP's hope that a group of studentswould emerge who not only had achieved in tra-ditional areas, but who also had an additional setof competencies that MAP wished to suggest as de-

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fining the general education componeni.4 the bac-calaureate.

Communicating the reform. Those who are involved inthe reform of programs within institutiom gsave at leastone clear advantage over their counterpart, effecting insti-tution-wide change. That advantage lies in eommunicatingthe rudiments of the reform to the faculty and students whoare programmatically engaged. Their ergAgernent is pre-suznably the result of their a priori intemt ii and commit-ment to the reform.

The small college switching over its entire curriculummust get the word out to the pro, the anti, and the apathetic.If it conducts workshops on new teaching/learning ap-proaches, it must gauge the aspirations of the workshopsaccording to a broad range of interest and experience. Avisit to such a college, attempting to modularize its curri-culum, illustrated these difficulties. Initial faculty response

to the modularization imperative ranged from "I don't knowwhat a module is, and I'm going to sit tight until they tellme" to "Modules? Why, sure, I've designed 150 of them inthe last three weeks." It could reasonably be argued thatneither response indicated an unclerstandin

Summary of differences between college . izsity;

and some caveats. The preceding has briefly touched upon

some implementation issues which must be approacheddifferently, according to ins;itutional size or complexity andthe sweeeengness of reform. To summarize:

Implementing generk CBE in a total college cur-riculum has certain advantages over reform of aprogram within a university. These advantages are:1) the possible long-standiug tradition of concernfor developmental issues implied by CBE; 2) thefact that the, reform's autonomy is not an issuearticuldinz the reform with other curricular pro-

grams or agencies is thus no problem, and evalua-tion of the reform can (it doesn't, necessarily) occuraccording to criteria which befit the reform's goalsand purposes.

Implementing generic CBE in a program within auniversity has oertain advantagm 1) a substantialcadre of able and committed faculty can morelikely be identified before the fact; 2) communi-cating the rudiments of CBE to that cadre is lesstromblesome than embarking on a college-widefaculty development program.

One possible long-term disadvantage to the small col-lege which has not yet been raised is the market issue. CBEin small colleges may be stimulated in part by the decliningfortunes of such institutions. Whether CBE will ease thedecline remains to be seen. One could imagine instancesin which the decline would be hastened: it way be terriblydifficult to get the generic competency idea across to stu-dents who have been nurtured on content mastery andgrading and who expect more of the same in college.

The university, with its inherent variety and complexity,has the long-term advantage of 'hedging its bets," main-taining internal flexibiliqc .!; need not commit itself to asingle road "in a yellow wood."

But, ere smugness set in upon those of us from such"flexible" institutions, we should be reminded that the uni-versity's flexibility may also be depicted as a kind of schizo-phrenia by those committed to an ideal in, say, liberal edu-

cation. Universities, as private colleges, have resourceproblems these days. Attitudinal and fiscal support for CBundergraduate programs can get lost among the conflictingpriorities of graduate, professional, and preprofessionalprograms. The conflict may exist wiihin the individualfaculty member who divides Lis or her time between grad-uate and undergraduate teaching. Staking out a mission

for the liberal arts in such an atmosphere is not so differentfrom setting down immutable international law at theUnited Nations.

Conclusion

Recently, I attended a conference dealing chiefly withthe Personalized System of Instruction, or Keller Method.The rudiments of PSI are: self-pacing; learning units ormodules in which written tests evidence mastery; and theemployment of students as tutors. The main idea is thatstudents, in an atmosphere of positive re, furcement, willtake learning more upon themselves and, thus, learn better.

The mode of conference presentation was: lecturesfrom prepared papers; little or no interaction between pre-senter and audiencc; rigid scheduling, and a bombardmentof findings which were difficult to discern from facts.

I have little inherent objection to a conference conductedin this fashion. I was struck, however, by a small irony:we learned about PSI as "traditional" students passively,removed from the action, locked in to a schedule, receiversrather than doers.

A similar irony exists in the establishment of CBEprograms. Very often, out of the necessities of time andmoney, or the limitations of our knowledge about what isreally important in human performance, we define our termsand set our paths hastily and arbitrarily. "Our studentswill attain competence in critical thinking. Critical thinkingis a generic competency that involves, the ability to reason,to argue rationally, to recognize assumptions, be skeptical. ." Once defined, such constructs may be internally valid.But only continuous scrutiny can determine whether 1)they are being attained and 2) they indeed represent some-thing that is externally valid a crucial human capability.

We face a situation in which we must implement CBEprograms in a non-CB fashion. We can't be absolutely clear

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about our programmatic objectives; we can't be sure iffaculty development workshops or informal contacts or leg-islation or just "letting flowers bloom" will get our programwhere we want it to be. And we are hardly certain of how toknow when we've gotten there, and whether "there" is theright place to be. We are constrained to conduct our imple-mentation efforts in a manner that potentially only remotelyresembles the kinds of behavior we expect from studentsin the CB mode unless we bring to the endeavor the samecapacity to evaluate, to rationalize= our experience, that weexpect of our students.

This is said not to deride current CBE efforts, but topraise their daring and resourcefulness, and to reemphasizethe necessity for a self-conscious nosture of skeptical un-certainty. The risks and the logistical difficulties involvedin implementing CBE, particularly in the generic sense, areenormous. Perhaps the "fountain" can never be fully de-fined; but it's fun trying. And in such efforts, education quitepossibly finds its closest apr. . oximation to "Life."

VIII.

NOTES ON THE IMPACT ON STUDENTSOF A COMPETENCY-BASED

FRAMEWORK (CBF)

James L. Litwin

Ne; 7. ,ry amazement, I find that students are a rela-tively ..d topic when competency-based programsare disci. '. We discuss taxonomies, curricular strategy,the t: i'aculty, mechanics and logistics, but we rarelyget 2 to talking zibout students. We assume that pro-grams are good for students, especially if we've worked onthem diligently, and a funding agency has sanctioned us.We check it out with students at a later date. I do not pre-sume to speak for students, but would like to use this paperto raise student-related issues as I understand them, and asthey have been raised by students in various reports. Myown understandings are derived from what I know about thecompetency-based frameworks at Alverno, Mars Hill,Sterling, College 3 at Massachusetts (Boston), Grand ValleyState, Florida State, Colgate II, Governors State, and Bow-ling Green. What follows, then is a composite profile of"CBF and the student," rather than a finely tuned pictureof what it is like at any one specific institution.

Role of Student

The student, in general, should process through a CBFby: (1) undergoing initial diagnosis and inventory, (2)having an understanding of the competencies which mustbe attained, (3) negotiating prescriptions or learning ac-tivities to att,ain those competencies, (4) undertaking theprescriptions or learning activities, (5) continually evaluating

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progress, (6) submitting to final evaluation, and (7) beingcertified as "competent."

To a great degree, some of these steps are no differentfrom what may occur in the traditional framework. What isprobably ieooront is not the sequence of activities, buthow they a::Iterized in a CBF. It strikes me that whatfollows a::: es!Ltial characteristics of CB frameworks:

Time-Free (self-paced)Space-Free (on or off-campus)Individual Choice of Learning Activities (at times,

negotiated or prescribed)Personalized InstructionExplicit ObjectivesSelf-Evaluation for Readiness to TestSelf-Directed LearningMultiple Modes of Evaluation (simulation, tests,

jury exams, etc.)

In most instances, students must adjust to a programwith such expectations; they have usually experienced amore rigid and standardized curriculum in high school.The available material does give us some insight into prob-lems students encounter in CBFs, and adjustment problems

are apparent.

The following responses are taken from evaluationreports at some of the institutions previously mentioned.Again, this is a synthesis; each program provided somewhatdifferent problems for students, and each program had diCferent subpopulations (e.g., biology, nursing, urban planningstudents) with yet their own unique problems. I have takenthe liberty to group these.

Small numbers of students (anywhere from nine to forty)

were usually ,Iportel 1°. these studies. They identified these

problems:

1. Leattlitig, is tc ;.1 unstruaured, with resultant moti-

vational problems (no checkpoints, no reinforcers,no prods).

2. There is not enough contact with other students(though group interaction was aot esir y all).

3. Study habits must be changed.

4. Time must be budgeted differenay.

S. There is not enough credit given for the time andwork required (a common reaction in many experi-mental programs).

6. There is a tendency to procrastinate and defer com-pletion of work.

7. An anxiety about jury or oral examinations exists.

8. There is not enough direction on how the programworks.

9. Students feel little institutional support.

10. There is a frustration with continuing the programif th:s student perceives self as "competent."

All of these problems are not generic to competency-based frameworks, but that does not suggest they should bedismissed, perhaps they ought to be dealt with in theseframeworks as wt41 as in others.

There were also benefits that students peiceived; thesewould include:

1. Self-pacing.

2. Individualization.

3. Opportunity to know faculty.

4. Practice in presentation of ideas.

5. Experience in oral presentation.

6. Not having to just regurgitate material.

7. Individual tutoring available.

8. Testing when prepared.

9. Not having to attend boring classes.

10. Greater flexibility in personal scheduling.

Expected Outcomes

In one sense, benefits for students can be seen as pro-grammatic outcomes, but in another sense, we usually thinkabout outcomes as the results of having those benefits.I prefer to use them in the latter sense for this paper, andhave gone on to consider some expected outcomes for stu-dents who are experiencing competency-based frameworks.

A. Most CB frameworks emphasize process skills(analytic, information retrieval, hypothesis-testing,model-building, evaluative, etc.), as much, if notmore than content. However, it is still not clearif such skills will be gained solely through the learn-ing activky per se, or will `.qt- CBF itself be the teach-er, for example, will the student's evaluative skillsbe honed as he/ she decides on which learning ac-tivity meets necessary criteria? (The medium may bethe message.)

B. Students will become self-directed, if not they arelikely to fail or transfer or drop out. What responsi-bility do we have for students who can't handle suchan ideal?

C. The learner can eliminate g Jesswork at assessmenttime, and specific objectives will probably lead tohigher performance, though perhaps, at the loss ofa broader education. Specificity may produce "tech-nicians" regardless of occupational choice.

D. There will be a better relationship between one'scollege education and post-collegiate jobs. At pres-

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ent, there is little guarantee that a college educationpredicts anything except future academic achieve-ment.

E. Students can be involved in the community and gainexperience, but they may lose the benefits of beingin an environment with peers and faculty who dis-agree with them. The loss of struggling with value-conflicts could be detrimental to the student.

F. A choice of learning style on the part of the studentmay preclude forced development of other modes oflea r,';mg in a society which may demand such diver-sity.

G. The evaluation of self has obvious values, but thisshould not deny evaluation by others who often cancontribute insight.

Impact Research

I have been attempting to suggest possible impactsof competency-based frameworks on students, but assumethat we will continually assess that impact, rather than takeit for granted. Therefore, we must design some reasonablestrategies for understanding the impact of such programs.Although little is available on CBF, there are analogues toCBF or components of it that have been examined in termsof their impact on students.

In a recent review of the research on learner-centek:dreform I, along with the other authors, concluded that theliterature on PBTE and CBE is mostly "design" literature;research on PSI shows that PSI sections generally stimulatesignificantly higher test scores and more favorable evalua-tions of course and instructor; independent study is not well-researched; in general, students achieve equally well and areequally satisfied. We found that most of the research is basedon "one-shot" analysis using traditional achievement tests.

It rarely addressed other dimensions of intellectual develop-ment.

CBF presents a tremendous opportunity to measurethose outcomes which seem most critical: self-direction,analytic tools, model-building, evaluative skills, etc., becauseof the early diagnosis, pre-testing, and inventory work thatnormally takes place. In many instances, post-testing will

provide answers about the students' growth and develop-ment during college. However, the research will be farfrom problem-free. Few students will experience uniformlearning and developmental activities, therefore the varia-bles "causing" change will be even more difficult to cate-gorize than they are under conditions of uniform curriculumrequirements. In nearly all instances individual case studieswill have to accompany aggregate analyses, if we are tounderstand the impact of a CBF on students.

Concluding Comment

I am optimistic about the impact of CBF on students.However, there are at least two caveats which I would like

to mention which temper my enthusiasm.

1. Unless we can better transmit the importance of"process" skills, they may still go unused by stu-dents. There is no guarantee that these skills willbe used, just as there is no guarantee that informationwill be retained. The degree to which they becomehabits may be critical. Perhaps, that is why the CBframework must be the message (not the competen-cies). Some students will refine the art of "beatingthe system" in CBF just as they do under otherframeworks.

2. Those most likely to benefit from CBF will probablystay away. The self-pacer, the self-starter, the per-son who does well in jury exams will choose and par-ticipate in such programs. In those cases where

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there is no escape from such programs, many stu-dents will need help. Those who have the potentialto operate well in such a framework, but lack theconfidence or the immediate skills will probablysearch for the college or university that providesan alternative to a CBF.

IX.

EFFECT OF A COMPETENCY-BASEDINSTRUCTIONAL SYSTEM ON STUDENT

AND FACULTY ATTITUDES

Marcia Mutterer Mentkowski

As creators and implementers of instructional pro-grams, we must be prepared to respond to questions abouthow the instructional system considers the person. Thereare system characteristics of a competency-based frame-work (CBF) demanding that human factors be considered.In fact, a competency-based instructional system is so de-pendent on its ability to meet human needs that it willprobably be scrapped unless it continues to do so. JamesLitwin has given you a composite profile of "CBF and thestudent:' I wish to provide an in-depth profile of CBF andthe student by examining the gap between the ideal com-petency-based program and the real program as it may actrt -ally operate. I believe this contrast between eie real and theideal to be the product of two factors: (,) instructionalsystems are usually developed at institutions in a series ofsuccessive approximations to an ideally operating program;and (2) student and faculty attitudes and expecutions ac-quired from years of learning experiences interact with thecharacteristics of any new instructional system.

Since CBF is a relatively new instructional systemdeveloped in a series of successive approximations to theideal CBF, it has the potential to create as many studentand instructor affect problems as it attempts to solve. Per-mit me to illustrate this statement by taking a specific lookat instructor and student attitudes toward CBF in The Uni-versity of Toledo's Competency-Based Teacher Educationprogram. I will considei student and faculty attitudes

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because faculty attitudes toward the program affect studentattitudes, and vice versa. To ignore instructor affect is toignore a major determinant of student affect. I also believethat an understanding of student-faculty interaction effectsis (1) the key to solving affect problems, and (2) the sourceof establishing the kind of professional commitment neces-sary to overcome program flaws, and to achieve programgoals. While the very problems I identify may be solved ayear from now, the way in which they are solved is the sys-tem's stable component, the one that can be generalized toother programs.

The Ideal: Success Is Available to All

One of the characttics of CBF expected to createpositive student affect is ca-iterion-referenced vs. norm-referenced evaluation. Ideally, students are not competingagainst one another for a limited number of A's and B's.Success defined as mastery of instructional objectives isavailable for all. Advanced students may avoid redundantinstruction by testing out of instructional modules. Thereare several opportunities to "recycle" (receive additionalinstruction and reevaluation), if module criteria are notreached on the first attempt. There is no penalty to students'grades from recycling since failure to meet .ritf.ria wilt notbe "averaged in" to lower a final successful pezance.

. The Real:Differences in Performance Yield the Sik. .a.twards

What happens when all students do achieve mastery?Students raised on a norm-referenced system react by say-.ing, "No matter how hard I work cor,tored tO others, I .

get no special rewards." Students and er,,ipyers trained tocoinpare, do so. College grade-point ayerages still communi-cate excellence. Students say, "If we all reach mastery, howwill a potential employer know I really did a better job?".Rewards for and recognition of individual differences in' per-

formance are program characteristics that many studentsexpect. The ideal concept, that CBF offers a better oppor-tunity to becone a better teacher, is lost. The ideal of anindividualized program where each student is progiessingthrough some required m odules. and some self-selected mod-

ules at his own rate, with instructional strategies adaptedto his particular learning style, also is loq. In reality, thelack of individualized instruction and self-selection, charac-teristic of a program in its first approximation, creates feel-

ings that individual differences are not recognized. This isreflected in the variability of response to questions regardingthe pacing, flexibility and order of module presentation.The lack of individualization and options is more likely tocreate a dehumanizing picture of a mechanized, controlledprogram which turns out teachers whu look and act thesame.

Time limitations of university systems and the conse-quent necessity of some limit to the number of recyclingopportunities also belie the notion that success is availableto all. Getting each one of a large number of students to meetmodule criteria is difficult, and there may be the temp-tation for faculty to slightly reduce module criteria at the end

of a number of exhausting recycling procedures. Studentswho met criteria on the initial attempt have said, "It wouldhave been easier to do less on my own, get more instructionafter failing, and perhaps get even slightly lower criteria

by waiting!"

Thus opportunities to recycle may reduce anxiety, butthey also reinforce and reward procrastination. Procrasti-nation has a negative effect on student motivation that ex-pecially influences faculty perceptions of student effort.Competition and fear of failure may have been the majormotivation for some students. With these factors absent,students may attempt two of the three allotted tries beforethey make a decided effort. In an ideal CBF, failure is borneby the system. In reality, the professor perceives himself as

ultimately responsible for both student and system failure.He must "make up" for the failure of the student and thesystem by recycling. Recycling is vicwed as "extra work"for which he receives no load credit. If a faculty memberbelieves failure to be due to procrastination, he becomesangry. If recycling is due to, student absence, even thoughit is legitimaic, the professor also becomes upset. If re-cycling is due to lack of motivation, or if a student makesthe decision that he does not need the instruction to passthe module, the professor gets very upset. In CBF, classabsence is no longer a student's choice. Yet students believeit to be their right to miss class.

The Ideal: Diagnostic Evaluation

CBF expects to produce ositive instructor and studentaffect by using evaluation diagnostically. The instructorcan on the ezne hand demand mastery of all objectives beforeteacher certification, but can also allow several tries withouthaving to use evaluation as a punishment, thereby reducingtest anxiety. Instructors have a way to revise the programimmediately, and to test out the effects of revision imniedi-ately because they get constant data on the efficacy of in-struction from the computer-based assosment/revisionsystem.' Instructor time saved from scoring tests and record-ing test results may be devoted to preparing additionalinstruction for students who do not attain mastery. Eventhis additional preparation time is lessened through an anal-ysis of objectives not met, and by grouping students withlilce problems, information that is available from the assess-ment/revision report. The advance planning required byCBF to delineate objectives and criteria leaves more time forselection, design, and implementation of a variety of instruc-tional strategies.

Positive affect is further enhanced by the assessment/revision system that reduces the time-lag following testingand provides for more immediate feedback. Since a copy

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of the student's progress per module is sent to his adviseroften, the adviser can provide more up-to-date guidance.

The Real: Increased Anxiety OverData-Gathering and Evaluation

While the assessment/revision system provides for lesstime spent in scoring and recording, additional time i need-ed to interpret the results that come back to the instructorfor planning instruction for recycling. Further, more time isneeded to analyze the data for impioving instruction ingeneral. The emphasis on data collection and analysis mayturn off those faculty concerned with maintaining an aware-ness of and provisions for "humanizing" instruction. Aslow, step-by-step introduction of the systein helps alle-viate a negative reaction. It is important to give the taskof additional data-gathering to those faculty who are fam-iliar with the purpose and value of CBF scp that extra burdensare not placcd on faculty who may distrust the system andits increased data-gathering funefnn. Professors are evenmore likely to distrust the system data are used for non-program fuaction.;, such as accountability. Professors mustbe free to experiment with methods and objectives. Data onthe effectiveness of instructor perforstance must remainwithin the system and not ira ..accessible tr administratorsto make decisions on faculty pay and promotions, unlessthe faculty member requests that it be used. These safe-guards must be established to maintain both faculty and con-ser lit student affect. It is also important to recognizeth a. objective data from the assessment and revision systembe used in addition to the subjective data from facultyabout the success of objectives and teachiag methods.

While the assessment/revisian system provides imme-diate feedback to the instructor on student sCoretF, care mustbe taken to minimize the time between the studcut's aware-ness of his score, diagnostic feedback, and recycling oppor-tunities. While a student may feel very good about fmding

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out his test results immediately, this positive affect mayquicldy evaporate if diagnostic feedback does not followimmediately. Instances of student concern following thereceipt of a test score that did not reach mastery has led usto hold the test score until diagnosis, more instruction, andopportunities for recycling also are available.

Because evaluation in CBF is such an important compo-nent, there often is an increase in course time taken for test-ing and evaluation. Most college students, who have spentyears in a norm-referenced grading system, appear to reactto any evaluation with conditioned anxiety. While studentsmay verbally state that they "understand" the componentsof criterion-referenced evaluation and its positive effects,this "carry-over anxiety" causes most students to respond tothe increased evaluation of CBF with fear and trembling.For example, students are aware that preassessment scoresare not used to determine a final performance score, yetstudents often react to a low preassessment score (thatindicates they have not tested out of a module) with dejec-tion and frustratAon. As one student stated after 17 weeksin the program, "I wish you would tell us ahead of timewhen we will have pre-tests, so we could study for them."Further, many of the pre-tests in the further stages of ourcompetency-based teacher education program are field-based. Students And it easier to complete a module duringregular instruction than to arrange for a field-test and teach.

The testing center is a component of the assessment/revision system that is expected to overcome some of thisconditioned anxiety over evaluation. Students may come tothe testing center to take a pre- or post-test for a specifiedtime period (usually several days) at their convenience.There are no speed tests. Currently, however, most studentsprefer to use class time for test-taking since a trip to thetesting center takes more outside class time. Groupingpre-tests from a number of modules to reduce the numberof testing times has been effective in alleviating this prob-

lem to some degree. Making provisions for an attractivetesting center is another.

The Ideal: Public Objectives and Criteria

Another aspect of CBF is that objectives and criteriaare public. Since both are stated in advance of instruction,the student is assured that there is neither a hidden agendaof requirements nor unspecified criteria that will be clearonly after the course is over.

The Real: Public Criticism and a Hidden Curriculum

Unfortunately, however, poor objectives, poor instruc-tion, and poor criteria are also public. We have trained ourstudents to expect a system that works well and overcomesthe problems of other programs. We also train them to criti-cize our instructional system and we provide them oppor-tunities to do so. While student input is highly valued,criticism by students can affect the way both faculty andstudents feel about the worth of the program. Vociferousand emotional class discussions about the merits of the pro-cram may make both students and faculty feel that theprogram is going down the drain.

In order to minimize this negative effect we found itcritical to get objective and systematic attitudinal data fromstudents about the program. For example, we identify con-cerns about the program through class discussion. Then weask for comments on paper and we build a questionnairebased on these comments that measures attitudes towardfaculty management of instruction.

Identification of specific concerns is extremely impor-tant. Faculty are less 'Rely to take this kind of criticismpersonally. During one winter quarter, questionnaire data2identified specific concerns, but also indicated that 72 percent of that particular group of students agreed or stronglyagreed that "the team (of faculty) is trying to help us" and

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88 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that "most of the teammembers are friendly." Instructor affect presumably is higherwhen students say, "There are some things wrong but wethink you're nice, and you care about making it better;"than if students say, "There are these things wrong with theprogram, we don't like you either, and you don't seem tocare." During that particularly trying winter quarter, we allgot a lift when we found out that 58 per cent of the studentsagreed or strongly agreed that "most of the things we do forthis class seem relevant to completing the modules," andonly 21 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed with thatstatement. Fifty-nine per cent agreed or strongly agreedthat "most of the things we do for this class seem relevantfor teaching kids in schools," and only 21 per cent disagreedor strongly disagreed with that statement. Systematicallygathered attitudinal data versus selective criticism seems tobe a must for maintaining affect.

Systematic program revision in response to criticismsof the program however, is impossible without data. Asstated earlier, data collection also can create affective prob-lems. Not all faculty may have the skills or th:t desire toparticipate in numerous data gathering (especially the gath-ering of behavioral data), to record accurately, to interpretand use the results, and to carry out the implementation ofchange.

Constant revision of objectives and criteria in CBFlead faculty to recognize additional criteria important ingaining mastery of the modules, good teaching, or profes-sional commitment. There is a time-lag between the recog-nition of additional objectives and criteria, and when theyare written into the modules. Thus, students cannot tech-nically be held accountable. A professor may give specialinstruction which he thinks all students should have in-struction that may not be necessary for module mastery ascurrently written. Students have the experience of beingable to pass the module with only part of the instruction.

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Students used to cramming before their mid te711 and final,and missing classes in between, may try this strategy andoccasionally have it rewarded. Despite our intentions, wehave created another hidden curriculum.

Recommendations for Closing the Gap Between theIdeal and the Real

On the positive side, many of the negative effects onstudent and faculty attitudes created by CBF can be reducedin several ways. First, we need more recognition of individ-ual effort through more individualized instruction. We needto provide for as many individual differences in faculty andstudent expertise and interest as possible in the managementof instruction. Second, we need an improved evaluationsystem. Affective needs cannot be met in the absence ofconcommitant concern with program validation. Affectivesupport is generated for a program with demonstrated posi-tive outcomes. Third, we need systematic data gathering onstudent concerns, and we need to measure attitudes towardthe program often. Attitudes toward program concerns mustbe differentiated from attitudes toward faculty. Fourth,we need a continuing effort to make the hidden curriculumpublic. We should establish program commitment by facultyto CBF well in advance of implementation with students,commitment that preserves divergent viewpoints. We mustexamine the motivational components of CBF to predictstudent study and attendance behavior. We must identifyall expectations of student performance and make thempublic. Affective objectives should be included as partof the program.

Meeting Student Needs by Creating Commitmentto Program Goals and Values

One problem created by CBF that seems much moredifficult to solve is lack of student and faculty commitmentto program goals and objectives. In CBF it is rare to find

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modules for developing attitudes. Development of studentand faculty commitment is part of the hidden curriculum.With increas.xl attention to public performance, this hiddencurriculum becomes public. Both students and professorsmay realize that a fellow student should be counseled outof the program because of lack of ability or commitment.This is a difficult procedure and both students and facultywill attempt to avoid. Not only do differences in studentabilities and commitment become apparent. Differences infaculty and commitment become apparent. Students, con-fused by lack of faculty commitment, think, "If you don'tthink it is important, why do I have to do it?"

The problem of student and faculty commitment is ofmajor importance in our competency-baed teacher edu-cation program. The very nature of program goals (that ofteaching) demands commitment. But this program goalraises a larger issue: Can a teacher training progam reallybe completely responsive to student needs? Can students'individual rights as learners be resolved with the rights ofsociety by competent teachers? To what extent do studentshave the right to select their own objectives? To what ex-tent should competencies be chosen by experts?

I believe that student affect problems created by a pro-fessional program that is not completely responsive tostudent needs can ultimately be solved only through studentcommitment. We don't build professional commitment byidentifying commitment to educational goals and valueswith a staunch belief in CBF or some other instructionalsystem. CBF still remains a process and not a programeven though there are certain educational goals that arerealized through the components of CBF. Any objectivescan be competency-based. Students will not be committedto just any objectives and neither will the faculty. Theselection of goals and values remains of utmost importance,yet a smoothly running instructional system is a prerequi-site to student concern over program goals and values.

When we conducted a formative evaluation of ourprogram3 in which we compared our educational goalswith our objectives, we found that there were specific ob-jectives that fit each one of the broad overall programgoals. We did not have enough higher-order objectives thatrealize an understanding of the goals and values of the prosfession. Concern for the educational, psychological, andphilosophical rationale underlying competencies creates asense of professional community and commitment and alsoleaves students with a Gestalt of teaching, rather than a setof specific, unrelated skills. We know we aren't going todevelop values or commitment in students by having themgo through a module on values clarification or a module inwhich the stages of moral reasoning are identified. The nic:114

and ethical dilemmas that take place every day in univer-sity and public school classrooms have to be dealt with insmall group discussion. Student and instructor interetionis the key to solving affect problems and the source of cuab-lishing the kind of professional commitment necessary toovercome program flaws and to achieve program goals.

1. Gentry, C.; Cohen, S.; Dunn, T.; Mutterer, M.; Myers, D.; Yorke, D.;Dolinsky, D., and Beckwith, D. "Without an As:iessment and RevisionSystem, CBTE Programs are Lost," PBTE, Vol. 3, No. 3, Sept., 1974,

pp. 1, 2, 8-12.

2. All 0.ta reported are from a questionnaire developed by MarciaMutterer and Dennis Myers, who conducted a study of student affect.

3. Mutterer, M.L., and Irmen, A. "P. Formative Evaluation of the Elemen-tary Competency-Based Teacher Education Program at The Universityof Toledo." Research report submitted to the College of Education,The University of Toledo, 1974.

X.

THE CUE CENTER: THE FUTURE OFGENERAL EDUCATION

Gary A. Woditsch

TIre Future oj General Education. That, indeed, is quitea topic. If I were sane, I would simply stand here speechless,but sanity has never been a prerequisite for public speaking.So I will calmly tell you what the future of general educationought to be, describe briefly how the CUE Center relatesto that miraculous future, and take my chances with what-ever straitjacket or net emerges from the wings.

I can't resist first sharing with you an observation onwhat general education is like today. In a recetit speech atHillsdale College, John Howard, president of Rockford Col-lege, chose to paraphrase a comment which Macbeth rnakesin the second act, as he seeks solace within the chapel. Inthe original, the comment is as follows:

Confusion now hath made his masterpieceMost sacrilegious murder hath broke opeThe Lord's anointed temple and stoleThere the life o' the building.

John Howard's paraphrase has it as follows:

Confusion now hath made his masterpieceMost outrageous nonsense hath broke opeThe honored house of intellect and stoleThere the life o' the building.

When one scans the bulk of what general education hasbecome in the halls of academe, it is difficult to avoid a glumconcurrence with Howard's paraphrase. But there is a sparkof light in all the murk. Even John Howard says he's not

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pessimistic about the future. He can't conceive how thingscould get any worse, and he allows as how some voices haveemerged that speak good sense. I would maintain that atleast up to this instant, the conference has been blessedby some of those voices, and as one glances through theexcellent little book prepared by the Southern RegionalEducation Board, A CBE Primer, there is good cause to hopefor more voices to come. I'm going to ride that hope, lickety-split, to some point in the future where all my dreams havecome true. But fffst I have to decipher two guideposts on thepath so you have at least some idea how I got there.

My first point is too simple to put simply, so let me makeit a little more difficult I want to assert an axiom aboutman's relationship to his world. We get to the axiom by not-ing that all sentient organisms exhibit a capacity for di-rected action. They can organize behavior across time so asto realize non-random future states. If they can't do that,they can't survive. And we can let this capacity for directedaction stand as a primitive definition 6f purposiveness akind of purposiveness that both man and the amoeba share.

Now here's the axiom: All purposive organisms dealwith their matter-energy environment selectively. Thatmeans that if they are to survive at all, they can attend toand process only a very tiny portion of the informationavailable in their real context. Investigators tell us that viaour visual system alone, we receive a hundred million bitsof information every waking second. We can't begin to han-dle that amount of information indiscriminately, so our eye,which is a biolologically selective organ, ignores the bitsand attends only to their field effect.

Most organisms are pre-determined in their selectivity.Th t. criteria that fixes what they respond to in their environ-ment is biochemically defined, so that a tiny set of emana-tions from the world around it attract the amoeba, and ano-ther tiny set repel it. The rest of the world goes by unnoticed.

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ag.-4F3-

When we come to man, we see that he, too -- despitehis noble complexity must deal with the world selectively.But wonder of wonders, the criteria he employs are variable,and a good part of the variability is under his control througha higher order capacity we call cognition. To a large degree,man builds his own criteria for what he chooses to countas salient in his world, and this capacity to build his owncriteria to give different forms to the "bloomin, buzzingconfusion" of experience means that in a profoundlyreal sense he models his own world. And he strives to modelin such a way as to better serve his purposes.

The second assumption is a bit' more complex, so I'llput it simply: By his own lights, man can never achieve aterminal knowledge of himself or his world. He cannotreach the "bottom line," so to speak. He can only achievebetter approximations given his purposes. As he buildsbetter models to account for experience, they in turn stimu-late refinements and extensions of his purposes, which inturn stimulate new approximations, and so on and on.

It is now a simple task to step into my ideal for generaleducation. General education will be dedicated to developingmore competent model builders and wielders. It soundssimple, and probably inane, but it is neither. The transitionfrom now to then would be, perforce, radical. Let me try toconvey the difference between today's approach to generaleducation and one in command of this notion of cognitionas a process of modeling.

The difference, in a nutshell, is that the processes goodstudents employ as they negotiate general education curri-cula will themselves explicitly become that curriculum.One can find a parallel in the development of rhathematics.

For approximately two thousand years ancient Egyp-tians used arithmetic to resolve the quantifiable problemsof an increasingly sophisticated society. In its latter phasesthe process required great numbers of scribes working their

arithmetic problems on slates from dawn to dusk; two thou-

sand years of working arithmetic before someone discovered

a meta-language called algebra! Algebra is, after all, alanguage about arithmetic, and it opened vistas in our un-derstanding of the behavior of numbers that could never beunlocked by the language of arithmetic alone. It made ex-plicit what the scribe was in fact doing with his numbers.By employing algebraic functions, one could do in five min-utes what would cost the competent scribe five hours,or perhaps five days. And it wasn't until we invented alge-bra that we could really begin to understand the capacity,nature, and character of arithmetic. Man wins understandingthrough the process of building a language appropriate towhat he seeks to understand.

That is what I think is in store for general educationthe process of building a new language about the liberaleducation of human beings. Interestingly enough, it willnot be a 11:nguage primarily concerned with "changing"general educk. +ion. Its purpose will be much more radicalthan that; it wi.0 employ new perspectives mainly to improve

our grasp of whi, t is really happening in current educationalpractice. What th: new language is capable of illuminatingthere will determi 'le the nature and thrust of future change

in general educae.on.

This new :znitige will mark a shift from an "arith-metic" to "algebra" of general education. It will help

us stop the compulsive "adding" and "subtracting" ofbodies of knowledge in the shallow hope that one or anothersum will signify having been generally educated. It willlead us to concentrate on the "functions" that characterizethe liberally educated mind; functions that prove produc-tive across whole ranges of life's problems, and demonstratethemselves as again and again useful in the business ofliving.

You might think it odd that we are at present short of

an adequate language for the job. We do not have an "alge-

bra" descriptive of general and highly transferable compe-tencies, and how these may best be developed. We do nothave such a meta-language simply because we have not,until recently, seen a need for one.

But how can this be? Mankind has always been inter-ested in his own capabilities, mid devotes much effort to theiranalysis. True indeed, but that interest, particularly as itrelates to education, has been constrained by a set of power-ful assumptions that only recently have come to be ques-tioned.

The first assumption is that man's competencies, what-ever they might be, unfold and mature automatically. Thenotion that has somehow dominated our understanding ofhow man matures is that he will tend to perform as well ashe is able. On that assumption, there is no need to compre-hend how competencies develop. All that we need do iscause them to be exercised.

We are coming now to understand that man functionsno better than he has to, rather than as well as he is able.Moreover, the evidence continues to mount that we aremarvelous, and often unselfconscious, mimics. Wheneverpossible, I will strive to accomplish with a lower-orderskill what you might wish me to engage with a higher orderone, and I'll do so in such a manner that you will fina itdifficult to tell the difference. There are college freshmenwith high ACT scores and reputable high school records whohave never engaged in sustained conceptual thought, simplybecause easier ways of using one's head have sufficed. Anumber of them earn college degrees without ever triggeringsuch higher order skills in the process.

The shift from viewing man as inclined to perform asbest he can, to viewing him as inclined to doing no more thanhe must, impacts seriously on the general education agenda.When we understand that human beings can successfullyavoid developing a number of basic, highly transferable

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(and hence broadly useful) competencies, we suddenly needa capacity to discriminate competencies from counter-feits, and we need new understandings of how best to se-quence and stimulate the development of generic capa-bilities.

In its small way, that is what the Competency-BasedUndergraduate Education (CUE) Center at Bowling GreenState University strives to move toward fundamentallynew insights concerning generalizable human competenciesand how they might best be developed. I'll describe verybriefly four classes of activity that the CUE Center pursues.It is useful to think of each activity as something that needsto be done in building our new language.

A language needs a universe about which it may dis-course. Human development is the proper general educationuniverse, and the CUE Center combs literature across thebehavioral, natural, and speculative sciences for what canbe gleaned there concerning the character of human capa-bilities and their mode of maturation. The result is a growingset of annotated bibliographies on .cognitive skills, valueclarification, conflict resolution, CBE and CBTE, and curri-cular experimentation generally. From hence will emergethe words and terms the atomic units of our new generaleducation language.

Second, a language needs to "try" its meanings. It de-velops its semantics by relating words to one another theway experience relates the things those words desrabe.The CUE Center commits itself heavily to sponsoring facultyexperimentation so that our new general education languagewill be vulnerable to experience. We have faculty engagedin developing and testing "de-jargonized" instruments fordiagnosing critical thinking competencies; faculty carefullycontrasting incompatible approaches to the development ofcritical thinking skills; faculty taxonomizing problem solvingstrategies, and experimenting with the educability of infer-

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ence patterns. We have faculty engaged in a massive action-research effort to determine whether PSI/Keller/ Masterymethods of instruction develop generalizable and trans-ferable skills. Other faculty are probing the degree to whicha standard undergraduate college curriculum does or doesnot require employment of various cognitive skills. Peda-gogies for the development of value clarification and writingskills are under pursuit by faculty in controlled environ-ments. All of this experimentation is designed to teach usmore about the way generic competencies function and grow.It also sets a norm that we prize for a general educationmeta-language, and that is that its assertions should be falsi-fiable.

Fourth, and most difficult of all in securing a new lan-guage, there is need for a community of "speakers" who arecommitted to a constant process of insuring the utility andvitality of the tongue. Cliches need to be thrown out andmore precise and probing formulations adopted. Withoutsuch a community, our new general education language willgrow as limp and flacid as our present one is. At this pointwe begin to talk about new role models for otir primarylanguage users, who will be faculty. If the language is toremain illuminating, it must remain experimental, and itwill remain experimental only if experimentation charac-terizes its user& What this implies is a professional stancethat recognizes general education as the least rather thanthe most secure domain of educational practice. As wild-eyed as it may sound, I insist that the only equable way toenter a general education course is with clear expectationsof what you suppose should happen to students therein, andget curiosity as to whether it does, in fact, happen. That isan experimental attitude; the only attitude that will keep thelore of our new language from becoming myth.

We have found faculty at Bowling Green and at everyother institution we've visited who embody this problematicview of general education, who recognize that the old Ian-

guage is no longer adequate, and who have set about siftingthrough the evidence for new ways of defming, and henceattacking the problem. The ones who progress and whoretain their excitement are those who have managed to shifttheir focus from their own disciplines to the impact of theirinstruction on the development of student capabilities.That, I would assert, is the future language of general edu-cation. If we do not help speak it and shape it, we mayshortly be judged, by those who partake in and deserve gen-eral education, as having nothing at all to say.