According to the OECD, The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other education policy experts all over the world, an urgent reform is needed to promote education innovation with "competencies" as the core. To investigate the feasibility to apply competency-oriented education, this pilot study surveyed the…

A companion to "Traditional Trade Apprenticeships: Training Activity, Employer Incentives and International Practice," this report collates qualitative material from in-depth interviews and focus groups with employers, trainers, apprentices and relevant government officials describing what is effective, what is not, and what needs…

Purpose: This paper aims to deal with the skills for sustainable development in engineering courses. The main objective is to identify which competences should be developed in these courses to contribute to the resolution of conflicts related to sustainability, as well as the means used by universities for their development.…

Examination of the transition of successful students from university into the labour market reveals a significant gap between the competencies acquired during higher education and those needed in the workplace. In this article, the authors discuss a research study undertaken to analyse the employability traits of engineers who had recently…

In engineering sciences like mechanical or automotive engineering, pre-knowledge in mathematics is required to follow deeply specific engineering lectures. Mathematical skills are essential preconditions to successfully complete engineering lectures. It is necessary that these preconditions are identified for each individual student so that…

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce--the world's largest business federation--and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation have for the past five years been attempting to bridge the gap and address trust issues between the postsecondary education community and employer community. Rather than placing limitations on the curriculum or taking away academic…

This article presents the problem of defining the concept of "competence", due to it being an integral and complex term that has been applied in many domains as well as in a more general sense for everyday life. However, no doubt, a competence can only be tested and valuated in the practice, and it is a person who becomes competent in a…

Based on the theory of Synergistic Leadership (Irby et al., 2002), as well as the Framework for 21st Century Learning (P21, 2019) and related research, this research applied mixed methods with questionnaire surveys and interviews to propose the supporting leadership factors for the mastery of core competencies for College English (CE) learners in…

Risk is always present in people's lives: diseases, new technologies, socio-scientific issues (SSIs) such as climate change, and advances in medicine--to name just a few examples--all carry risks. To be able to navigate risks in everyday life, as well as to participate in social debate on risk-related issues, students need to develop risk…

This chapter reconstructs the making and implementation of the new national curriculum in Finland (2012-2016). This research draws on non-affirmative theory of education and discursive institutionalism. The curriculum making process is perceived as a non-hierarchical educational leadership process where the National Board of Education (NBE)…

Secondary education curricula highlight competence-based learning; although meaningful school-intervention habits have not yet been observed. The initiatives implemented have focused primarily on promoting the combined development of no more than three key competences. This article presents an international study under the Erasmus+ and H2020…

The aim of this report is to build a shared understanding of competence by providing clarity around the concept and its implications for educational practice. The authors present an understanding of competence that is research-based, relevant and appropriate for diverse educational contexts. This will help to create stimulating, thoughtful and…

Learning how to plan a lesson is central to teacher education, yet there is only little research so far that has investigated how well student teachers write lesson plans. The aim of this paper, therefore, was to explore the competence of student teachers in lesson planning, with a special focus on the Cameroonian context. More specifically, the…

The purpose of the study is to analyze 'systems of reason' that govern the discursive practices constructed in terms of lifelong learning under the name of education reform. This study examined the notion of lifelong learning as a cultural thesis describing modes of life for producing (future) citizens through an analysis of documents from the…

Finland has recently reformed the national school curriculum, basing it on so-called twenty-first century skills. The curriculum prescribes that schools must organise at least one multidisciplinary learning module per year. In this case study, we investigate the implementation of such a module in secondary school (grade 9) from the perspective of…