Approaching the Concept of Competency

The concept of competency is one of the core elements in this book. For this reason, it is crucial to illustrate several approaches to the definition of competency. Those include the psychological perspective, historical developments in the education domain, and recent discussions related to competency, student assessment, and educational standards. Although competency-based teaching and learning has been successfully applied in several disciplines for a while, it has only recently started to gain traction in computing. In this chapter, taxonomies and models for the classification of competencies with regard to their cognitive complexity are presented. According to the Information Technology 2017, and the Computing Curricula 2020, competency comprises knowledge, skills, and dispositions to accomplish a task. Therefore, this chapter defines these components in the context of computing by introducing national and international competency-based curricula recommendations. It further presents related research on competency in computing education.