Colleagues, since COVID-19 is declared a pandemic, I am refraining from further actions in our LinkedIn group Competence Studies, although competence is part of the battle against further proliferation of the virus in two ways. Competencies of authorities are in play, as well as competencies of professionals and the public. Hopefully, with concerted measures the pandemic gets contained soon. Wishing you all good health!

I did some more advertising on Twitter and Facebook (yes, I am back on that again) for the LinkedIn group Competence Studies. Surprise: I’m very honoured the group quickly grew over 30 members. Continue reading LinkedIn group Competence Studies >30 members

The article of Anahuac Valero Haro and colleagues is now published online, open access in the Journal of Constructivist Psychology. The full reference now is: Valero Haro, A., Noroozi, O., Biemans, H.J.A., & Mulder, M. (2020). Argumentation Competence: Students’ Argumentation Knowledge, Behavior and Attitude and their Relationships with Domain-Specific Knowledge Acquisition. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/10720537.2020.173499.

Last week I created a LinkedIn group to connect professionals who are working in the field of competence theory, research and practice. This group is dedicated to colleagues who are interested in competence practices such as in education, training, development and management. Continue reading LinkedIn group on Competence Studies started

After 6 years of start-up and early consolidation, I resigned from the Editorial Board of the International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training, IJRVET (https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hup2/ijrvet/), to make place for my esteemed Swiss colleague Prof. Barbara Stalder (https://www.phbern.ch/ueber-die-phbern/personen/barbara-e-stalder). IJRVET is a spin-off of the Vocational Education and Training Network (https://vetnetsite.org/about/) of the European Educational Research Association (https://eera-ecer.de/), successfully initiated and realised by the excellent previous VETNET convenor, Prof. Michael Gessler (https://www.itb.uni-bremen.de/ccm/profiles/gessler/index.de). Barbara now acts as co-convenor of the network. I wish Barbara and the Editorial Team lots of further success!

A study of Anahuac Valero Haro and colleagues Omid Noroozi and Harm Biemans on fostering argumentation competence in online higher education is accepted for publication by the Journal of Constructivist Psychology. The focus of the study is on argumentation knowledge, behavior and attitudes, and the relationships of these with domain-specific knowledge acquisition. The background of the study is the debate about the alleged tensions between integral competence development on the one hand and (domain-specific) knowledge development on the other hand. Continue reading Argumentation competence and domain-specific knowledge development

Good news for Dr. Carla Oonk of the chair group of Education and Learning Sciences of Wageningen University and her team of co-authors . Her research on teacher competence profiles in higher education is truly interesting. In this study the teachers are being regarded as knowledge brokers on the boundary of theory and practice. The reference of the article will be for now: Oonk, C., Gulikers, J.T.M., Den Brok, P.J., Wesselink, R., Beers, P.J., & Mulder, M. (accepted). Teachers as Brokers: Adding a University-Society Perspective to Higher Education Teacher Competence Profiles, Higher Education. As soon as the article is published more information about the content of it will be given here.

Op 22 januari heeft Aimée Huizinga met succes haar scriptie verdedigd voor de opleiding Master Onderwijskunde (MEd). Het thema van het onderzoek is wat kleine basisscholen in krimpregio’s kunnen doen om te overleven en te ontwikkelen. Van harte gefeliciteerd! Bedankt Dr. Joachim Wetterling voor de begeleiding van deze scriptie.

Jacqueline Akkermans succesfully defended the Thesis for her Master of Education (MEd) on December 17. Jacqueline did her thesis work within Van Oord, whom many may not know, but think of the Palm Island of Dubai; they co-constructed that. Ring a bell? The title of the thesis is ‘Moving from Training to Performance’, which is a relatively old theme in social science, but still very current for the learning and development profession in many places of the world. Based on various sources, Jacqueline drafted a competence framework for learning and development professionals as performance consultants. Also, not new, but still needed. What appears to be the case is that performance consultancy seems to be a quantum leap for many organizations, whereas it has the potential to greatly increase the quality of work and productivity of the organization. The only simple question is: how? And the study shows: this is easy to ask, but difficult to answer. Furthermore: is the learning and development professional actually the one to initiate, carry out, implement, and improve performance consulting or use it’s result as input for training and development? Congratulations Jacqueline Akkermans. Thanks Dr. Joachim Wetterling for serving as examiner of this thesis.

Taco de Bos successfully defended his Master thesis on December 17. The theme of his thesis is vision development in teams of vocational education to improve the practice of career guidance. In the thesis, an interesting mix of research methods was used, students, teachers, and study advisors were consulted, which resulted in a rich information set, based on which a vision on career guidance was developed. This established common ground is seen as an essential condition for the improvement of the quality of career guidance. Congratulations Taco! Thanks Dr. Joachim Wetterling for serving as coach in this thesis project.