Craft Category: Artifacts

This report updates the field’s 2011 working definition of competency-based education, which helped to build the field and create common understandings of key elements in competency-based systems among stakeholders. Competency-based education is being implemented at deeper levels in more schools every year. It is a major shift in school culture, structures, and pedagogy focused on ensuring that all students succeed and addressing the fundamental shortcomings of the traditional model.

Eight years after creating the original working definition, feedback from across the field indicated a need for an update to reflect a deeper understanding of key issues and new developments. This report presents the new definition, which was developed with extensive input from invited attendees at the second National Summit on K-12 Competency-Based Education and from a technical advisory group of more than 40 experts and leaders in the field. It also includes a set of belief statements, answers to frequently asked questions, and a brief discussion of common misconceptions about competency-based education. These provide essential context for understanding the definition and the field in which it is situated. Finally, resources are provided for additional exploration of competency-based education policies and practices.

This report analyzes recent learning sciences research and provides nine recommendations to address a critical need: how can education policy support and align with the science of learning and development?

Research on how students learn and develop is providing teachers, practitioners, and policymakers with insights on how to help students learn and grow academically and develop holistically to achieve successful outcomes in their education and in life.

This report intends to bridge a knowledge gap in the field and can be used by education leaders to create a vision and framework for how to best support student learning and development.

A sample packet of scaffolded math activities that allows students to work through problems of increasing difficulty for each discrete skill.

In this audio interview you’ll hear a description of progression packets and how they are used.

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