college eassys general
Benefits for staff
If competency mapping can actually give a picture of the structure of the course as the students experience it, teaching staff will be able to use that picture as the basis for course refinement. The identification of key concepts is the first step towards designing a syllabus. The information gained can also be published to the students, for example by including it in the subject information handout that students usually receive in their first lecture, or by putting it on the courseware web page.
Of course, it is quite possible that the structure revealed by analysis of student results does not match the lecturer's idea of the conceptual structure of the course. In this case, the revealed structure may suggest ways in which the course can be improved. For example, if two competencies that should be related (for example, C pointers and passing by reference) are not clustered together, it could indicate a need to make the connection more explicit to the students. If the competency map uses all the coursework marks as input, this will not help the students of that year; however, it may well help teaching staff to refine the coursework for the next delivery of the course. It would also be useful to staff who are teaching follow-on courses, as they would gain a better idea of which topics need revision.
A competency map using only the marks for half of the course can be produced if staff wish to refine the course on the fly, but care must be taken that the data are sufficient: if the only marks on record are the first six prac marks, it is unlikely that any useful conclusions can be drawn. It is not yet certain how many points are needed for competency mapping to be useful, but it is likely to depend on the amount and complexity of the course material.
These uses assume that competency mapping will elucidate the structure of the course. If, however, the technique does not do this, then there are still potential benefits: logically, we would expect that activities that test strongly related competencies should show correlations in their marks; if this is not the case, there must be some reason. For example, written exam questions about linked lists might not correlate strongly with practical questions about linked lists if success in pracs is more closely related to factors other than subject knowledge. This could be the case if the some students find their work environment --- operating system, compiler and editor --- difficult to use. In this case, prac questions will tend to cluster much more strongly with other prac questions, and much less strongly with theory questions. The competency map can show that there is a problem; it is then up to the teaching staff to investigate that problem. Of course, competency mapping over subsequent years of the course will help the staff know when they have ameliorated the problem.
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