A Study on Instructors’ Understanding and Support Requests for Competency-Based General Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find out the instructors’ understanding and application levels, difficulties, and support requests for competency-based general education(CBGE) at university. For this, FGI was conducted with 18 instructors participating in general education at J University in the Chungnam province. Then, the interview results were analyzed to see how they differ according to instructors’ teaching years, prior training experience(on competency-based education, CBE), and academic characteristics of subject. As a result, first, instructors’ understanding and application levels of the competencybased education turned out to show the bigger difference by prior training experience on competency-based education than the years of their teaching career. Second, the difficulties faced by instructors in the process of practicing competency-based education have been reported to be various over 3 areas like insructional design and implementation, coordination of students and learning activities in general education, and educational conditions. Especially, instructors without prior training experience in CBE were found out to have more serious difficulties, especially when teaching basic science or theory-based subjects, like determining main competency for his subject. Third, instructors’ support requests for practicing competency-based education were founded to be diverse such as special lectures, workshops, experience-based projects like CBE curriculum development including development of evaluation tool or consulting, and teaching communities for sharing informations and good examples. Especcially, the instructors without prior training experience requested firstly basic program like special lecture which provides basic understanding on CBE. Next, instructors, who already have special lecture or consulting experience, requested more experiential program on CBE. On the other hand, instructors who already have a experience of evaluation tool development project for his own subject in CBGE, requested teaching community or workshop for sharing more sophisticated informations and good examples of CBE. Finally, based on the research results, several ways to improve the instructors’ teaching competency for CBE were suggested.