Competence-based learning--an introduction and an overview.

The article presents information on competence-based learning. Ideas and attitudes tend to move in and out of fashion. The speed and mass of communication nowadays seem to make these movements both more extreme and more rapid in varying fields of everyday life. Education is certainly no exception to this and the competence movement is a current manifestation of the phenomenon. The collection of papers in this issue together provide a wide-ranging overview of these developments. The papers represent a number of countries, in particular the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and the USA. They represent a number of levels of accounting study and types of accounting specialization. Finally, they represent different attitudes to the validity and indeed the desirability of the whole competence notion. There is inevitably occasional overlap, but the papers are arranged in what works reasonably well as a rational sequence. The first paper, "Competence-Based Learning and Qualifications in the United Kingdom," gives an introduction and a brief survey of recent history, from a UK perspective, of the competence movement as regards business and business-vocational education and training in general, with no particular reference to accounting as such.