Worldwide, educational policies increasingly focus on students' intercultural competency development (ICD). But educational institutions struggle with its implementation due to difficulties concerning 1) explicating educational goals for ICD and 2) developing teaching, learning and assessment activities that foster this development. The paper…

An increasing number of universities around the world have adopted a learner-oriented approach to teaching. Collective learning is regarded as a way to support teachers to enhance this approach. Collective learning processes arise when the teachers collaborate and consciously strive for a shared vision, dialogue, collective action and evaluation.…

Objective: In the past decade, several authors have advocated that formative assessment programmes have an impact on teachers' knowledge. Consequently, various requirements have been proposed in the literature for the design of these programmes. Only few studies, however, have focused on a direct comparison between programmes with respect to…

An important learning goal in higher vocational education concerns the professional domain's shared body of knowledge. Constructivist programmes use "authentic learning contexts" and "self-directed learning" to create a close connection throughout the learning process between theoretical knowledge and other forms of…

In vocational education and training (VET) in the Netherlands, learning and working are integrated from the start. Authentic assessments are used during competence-based VET curricula to achieve correspondence between learning and working. The premise behind this study is that authenticity is subjective and that perceptions of assessment…

Women-only vocational courses in technology, which became popular across Western Europe during the 1980s, had fallen from fashion by 2000. Yet the need for such courses remains, at least in certain circumstances. Drawing on case studies of two women-only courses in information and communications technology (ICT), from the Netherlands and Scotland,…

This contribution follows the descriptive review of Weigel, Mulder and Collins regarding the use of the competence concept in the development of vocational education and training in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands. The purpose of this contribution is to review the critical analyses brought forward by various authors in this field.…

This contribution reviews how four European countries--England, Germany, France and the Netherlands--use the concept of competence in the process of developing vocational education and training. Competence in England is set in the context of the National Vocational Qualifications; in Germany within action competence and the approach to learning…