Are all students getting maximum value from bioscience practicals? Exploring the benefits of inclusive competence-based design

Practical work is expensive, complicated to organise and often exclusionary. However, practicals are commonly considered a core component of research-based bioscience education. This is difficult to justify when the majority of bioscience students will not go into bioscience research. We therefore need to have a robust rationale for including practical work in bioscience curricula, and to maximise the value of all practicals for all students whether in the laboratory, field or computational space. In this opinion article, we propose a competence-based education model for bioscience practical work, seeing competence as the ability to integrate skills, knowledge, attitudes and connections between practical learning and the wider world. We argue that using a competence model allows us to focus on the true value of practical work, and therefore to design more inclusive and authentic learning experiences. We encourage bioscience educators to rigorously question the purpose of practicals in their programmes, and whether they can maximise their educational value through more deliberate competence-driven curriculum design.