Accelerated substantial progress regarding many fields of production and services imposes pressure upon the labor market. Employers are desperately looking for skilled workers in nearly all technological fields. All over the world this pressure reaches the national systems of vocational education and training. Along with the output orientation turn new standards are imposed, forcing firms and schools to make every endeavor to improve and remodel their programs as well as their practices to reach more and more ambitious goals. To be successful they need the results of scientific research from which they demand reliable information on methods to diagnose the state and learning progress of students and on means to foster and promote competencies of heterogeneous groups of leaners. The book offers 22state-of-the-art articles covering the central fields of vocational education and training and reporting on new and adequate ways to deal with these challenges.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Blended Learning, ICBL 2018, held in Osaka, Japan, in July/ August 2018. The 35 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections named: Experiences in Blended Learning, Content Development for Blended Learning, Assessment for Blended Learning, Computer-Support Collaborative Learning, Improved Flexibility of Learning Processes, Open Educational Resources, and Pedagogical and Psychological Issues.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of current, innovative approaches to assessing generic and domain-specific learning outcomes in higher education at both national and international levels. It discusses the most significant initiatives over the past decade to develop objective, valid, and reliable assessment tools and presents state-of-the-art procedures to adapt and validate them for use in other countries. The authors highlight key conceptual and methodological challenges connected with intra-national and cross-national assessment of learning outcomes in higher education; introduce novel approaches to improving assessment, evaluation, testing, and measurement practices; and offer exemplary implementation frameworks. Further, they examine the results of and lessons learned from various recent, world-renowned research programs and feasibility studies, and present results from their own studies to provide new insights into how to draw valid conclusions about learning outcomes achieved in various contexts.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of extant literature on competence-based vocational and professional education since the introduction of the competence concept in the 1950s. To structure the fi eld, the book distinguishes between three approaches to defi ning competence, based on 1.functional behaviourism, 2. integrated occupationalism, and 3. situated professionalism. It also distinguishes between two ways of operationalizing competence: 1. behaviour-oriented generic, and 2. task-oriented specifi c competence. Lastly, it identifi es three kinds of competencies, related to: 1. specific activities, 2. known jobs, and 3. the unknown future. Competence for the unknown future must receive more attention, as our world is rapidly evolving and there are many ‘glocal’ challenges which call for innovation and a profound transformation of policies and practices. Th e book presents a range of diff erent approaches to competence-based education, and demonstrates that competencebased education is a worldwide innovation, which is institutionalized in various ways. It presents the major theories and policies, specifi c components of educational systems, such as recognition, accreditation, modelling and assessment, and developments in discipline-oriented and transversal competence domains. Th e book concludes by synthesizing the diff erent perspectives with the intention to contribute to further improving vocational and professional education policy and practice. Joao Santos, Deputy Head of Unit C5, Vocational Training and Adult Education, Directorate General for Employment, Social Aff airs and Inclusion, European Commission: “This comprehensive work on competence-based education led by Martin Mulder, provides an excellent and timely contribution to the current debate on a New Skills Agenda for Europe, and the challenge of bridging the employment and education and training worlds closer together. Th is book will infl uence our work aimed at improving the relevance of vocational education to support initial and continuing vocational education and training policy and practice aimed at strengthening the key competencies for the 21st century.” Prof. Dr. Reinhold Weiss, Deputy President and Head of the Research, Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Bonn, Germany: “This book illustrates that the idea and concept of competence is not only a buzzword in educational debates but key to innovative pedagogical thinking as well as educational practice.” Prof. Dr. Johanna Lasonen, College of Education, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA: "Competence-based Vocational and Professional Education is one of the most important multi-disciplinary book in education and training. Th is path-breaking book off ers a timely, rich and global perspective on the fi eld. Th e book is a good resource for practitioners, policymakers and researchers."

This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

Career and student counselling is a complex task that requires a high level of professionalism. This book introduces basic counselling skills in vocational and educational guidance. It is based on important scientific models. The book presents internationally recognized counselling approaches which include among others micro counselling, solution focused brief counselling and competence oriented counselling. It also addresses possibilities for the use of artificial intelligence. The book offers direct guidance for the consulting practice and supports competence development through case studies, tasks and didactically designed exercises. It is suitable as a guide for the training of consulting professionals in the field of career guidance.

This volume addresses an urgent need across multiple disciplines to broaden our understanding and use of response processes evidence of test validity. It builds on the themes and findings of the volume Validity and Validation in Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences (Zumbo & Chan, 2014), with a focus on measurement validity evidence based on response processes. Approximately 1000 studies are published each year examining the validity of inferences made from tests and measures in the social, behavioural, and health sciences. The widely accepted Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (1999, 2014) present five sources of evidence for validity: content-related, response processes, internal structure, relationships with other variables, and consequences of testing. Many studies focus on internal structure and relationships with other variables sources of evidence, which have a long history in validation research, known methodologies, and numerous exemplars in the literature. Far less is understood by test users and researchers conducting validation work about how to think about and apply new and emerging sources of validity evidence. This groundbreaking volume is the first to present conceptual models of response processes, methodological issues that arise in gathering response processes evidence, as well as applications and exemplars for providing response processes evidence in validation work.