Varying conceptions of competence: an analysis of how health sciences educators define competence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Current debate in medical education focuses on the nature of 'competency-based medical education' (CBME) and whether or not it should be adopted. Many medical schools claim to run 'competency-based' curricula, but the structure of their programmes can differ radically. A review of the existing CBME literature reveals that little attention has been paid to defining the concept of competence. A straightforward examination of what is meant by the term 'competence' is noticeably missing from the literature, despite its impact on medical training. OBJECTIVES: This paper aims to illustrate the varying conceptions of 'competence' by comparing and contrasting definitions provided in the health sciences education literature and discussing their respective impacts on medical education. METHODS: A systematic review of recent publications in medical education journals published in English and French was conducted to extract definitions of competence or, if definitions were not explicitly stated, to derive the authors' implicit conception of competence. A sample of 14 definitions from articles in the health sciences education field was studied using thematic analysis. RESULTS: There is agreement that competence is composed of knowledge, skills and other components. Although agreement about the nature of these other components is lacking, attitudes and values are suggested to be essential ingredients of competence. Furthermore, a clear divergence in conceptions of how a competent person utilises these components is apparent. One view specifies that competence involves selecting components according to specific situations, as required. A second view places greater emphasis on the synergy that results from the use of a combination of components in a given situation. CONCLUSIONS: These conceptual distinctions have many implications for the way CBME is implemented. A conception of competence as the selection of components may lead to a greater emphasis, in a training setting, on the mastery of each component separately. A conception of competence as the use of a combination of components leads to greater emphasis on the synergy that results as they are deployed in clinical situations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it