Competency-based education aims to provide students a more authentic and engaging learning experience, aligning with SUMI’s interest in moving beyond the black box of credentials. Given today’s technological advancements, workforce realities, and lessons from state-level strategies, the time might be right for competency-based education to achieve staying power.

What is competency-based education?

Competency-based education—which shares many characteristics with mastery-based education, personalized learning, and student-centered learning—is a commitment to students understanding and using information combined with individualized supports. Often conceptualized as project-based learning, it aims for students to truly absorb and synthesize materials and gain skills to use this information in different settings. This approach integrates academic, “noncognitive,” and career preparedness competencies into everyday learning.

Competency-based education in practice

An increasing number of states and districts are aligning their strategies with competency-based education. Although many states have topical resources for educators, a few states have developed more thorough strategies.

Several states stand out in implementing comprehensive competency-based approaches:

• New Hampshire has statewide competency-based standards and an accompanying assessment system that combines traditional state assessments with a mix of standardized and locally developed performance (task and project) assessments.
• South Carolina has a detailed list of competencies at each grade level and recently published a comprehensive set of guides and toolkits for educators. This framework has matured from earlier efforts that asked individual educators to align the competencies with state standards.
• Utah’s Personalized, Competency-Based Learning Framework and five-year grant program emphasizes the role of teachers, students, and families in the learning process and notes research supporting specific competencies.

Even with these exemplars, questions remain about broad-scale adoption. For example, although New Hampshire has the most advanced system of competency-based measurement, the entire state’s student population is smaller than in any of the nation’s largest 15 school districts. Could the state’s mix of standardized and performance-based assessments have fidelity in larger contexts?

Staying power in the current moment

Because competency-based education has been around for years, the field has learned a lot about why it hasn’t been adopted at scale. A 2014 Jobs for the Future report highlighted key barriers, including inconsistencies regarding what counts as competency and mastery across locales, the time and resources needed to support every student in their skill development, and challenges in assessing skills. Maine’s efforts in the past decade show that even political support isn’t enough to bypass these challenges. 

Why might now be different? Because of various concurrent factors, parents, employers, and educators are calling for an engaging, individualized education experience that prepares students to thrive in an artificial intelligence (AI) economy. Beyond the calls for a different educational experience, AI might be a solution to some of the thorny expansion problems of decades past.

Parents are motivated by pandemic learning

Parents want teaching and learning that is tailored to their students’ needs and keeps them engaged. The pandemic exposed more parents to truths that most educators already knew: Kids do not all learn in the same way or at a linear pace. During the pandemic (and every remote learning day since), parents also experienced the difference between seat time and learning time. Finally, the postpandemic attention on absenteeism has ignited conversations about how to make school more engaging for students. For many parents, the K–12 status quo no longer feels acceptable, and competency-based education might feel like a natural solution.

Employers are seeking qualified workers

Employers are also calling for changes in the outcomes of a K–12 education. Colleges and workplaces are adapting to graduates who might not have the same skills as in past decades. Although high school success metrics are hard to track with the decline in high school exit exams, the most consistent measure of eighth-grade scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress shows consistently declining reading scores and lagging math scores. As a result, employers and state leaders are likely to intensify efforts to strengthen workforce preparedness.

The importance of durable skills in the age of AI

As AI becomes more integrated into every employment sector, parents and educators are paying closer attention to “noncognitive” or durable skills. The mastery of basic academic skills remains important and should not be undervalued, but the necessity of higher-order skills feels more crucial when anticipating a labor market where creativity, scrutiny, and flexible thinking will complement evolving technologies. Competency-based education might be one way to embed these skills into the learning experience. Although we believe these skills have always been vital for economic mobility, the rise of AI might change the necessary mix of skills for more middle-wage job earners, making this broader interest timely and relevant.

AI’s potential to help expand competency-based education

Specific applications of AI might be able to solve some of the current challenges to expanding competency-based education. By reducing teachers’ administrative workload on tasks like lesson planning and braiding competencies into curricula, AI might free up more time for engaging student-centered learning.

AI might be developed to automate the assessment of project-based learning (i.e., situational judgement tasks). Currently, evaluating these tasks is time-intensive and hard to standardize, limiting the assessment of skills and competencies. This is an area we’ve noted is ripe for innovation. Regardless of these developments, education leaders will need to name the skills and competencies students need for later success and define what constitutes mastery.

What’s next for competency-based education

This renewed focus on competency-based education is important for all students. We’re excited to catalyze efforts to define the skills and competencies that matter for economic mobility. As competency-based education evolves, it should ensure students living in or near poverty are prioritized. And we’re not alone—our next blog post will highlight how education organizations are defining important skills and expanding competency-based education and assessments.