Dealing with the Research Design

The COMET method is a hypothetical competence model whose rationale is based on the theories of complete action, the novice-expert paradigm, and the model of the expression of cognitive partial competences. With its widely ramified research network, the COMET project shows that two research traditions, hypothesis-driven and discovery-based open research, are not opposing research concepts that weaken each other, but that they each have specific potentials that complement and support each other. Already in the first COMET project, a stagnation of competence development was measured on the basis of a cross-sectional analysis. The trainees in the second and third year of training had an almost identical level of competence. At the second test time (longitudinal section), 69% of the test persons in the COMET project Industrial Mechanic Hesse achieved the highest level of competence. In the previous year, only 38% of these test persons—as second-year trainees—achieved the highest level of competence. In the same period (1 year), the proportion of at-risk students in this test group dropped from 13% to only 5%. Thus, a very high increase in competence was measured from the second to the third year of training. The stagnation phenomenon had disappeared! This could be attributed to the fact that the teachers involved had acquired a broader understanding of the subject through intensive reflection on the results of the first test. They were thus in a position to qualify the third-year trainees accordingly higher in the second test than the second-year trainees.