Background As education in the United States pushes for accountability, educational programs across the country are attempting to find innovative ways to measure student learning outcomes. Competency‐based education is one model favorable among many academic institutions and accreditation agencies because it links theory to practice (Clark, Competency‐based education for social work: Evaluation and curriculum issues, 1976; Hall Johnstone Pace, Competency education series: Policy brief one, 2013). The research indicates that there is no standard definition of competency‐based education and agreement on the criteria that encompass this model (Book, All hands on deck: Ten lessons from early adopters of competency‐based education, 2014; Le, Wolfe, Riesman, On competence: A critical analysis of competence‐based reforms in higher education, 1979). Methods This research reviewed the literature on competency‐based education and interviewed key informants from various disciplines to gain a deeper understanding of this phenomenon. Results This research constructs an operational definition of competency‐based education and then applies this definition to build an assessment tool to determine the extent that competency‐based education exists in an academic program.
J. Gervais (Thu,) studied this question.