Teacher-student interaction in competence-based vocational education in Indonesia

Competence-based education (CBE) is an educational innovation that has entered many countries all over the world during the last 20 years. Also Indonesian Vocational Education and Training started to implement CBE from 2004 onwards. Theory and research in the field of CBE in vocational education have advanced enormously during the last decades, although empirical research on CBE lags far behind. CBE research and practice is criticised for the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of CBE for actually stimulating student motivation and competence development or decreasing dropout; for the diminishing attention to knowledge development in CBE practice, and the cross-sectional nature of much CBE research. This thesis discusses the validation of competence-based education framework, the effectiveness of competence-based vocational education, and teacher behaviour for student competence development.This thesis starts with an investigation of the realisation of competence-based education (CBE) in vocational education in Indonesia. It examines the extent to which CBE design principles of the Comprehensive Competence-Based Education Framework (Sturing et al. 2011; Wesselink et al. 2007) developed in a Western context exist in Indonesian policy documents and school practices. This study reviews educational policy documents and collects cross-sectional survey data from 41 school principals, 453 teachers, and 2219 students from 41 agricultural vocational schools in five provinces of Java, Indonesia. Results showed that the ten CCBE principles listed in the framework exist to large extent in Indonesian policy documents. School principals, teachers, and students noticed the realisation of CCBE principles in the study programme to differing degrees, except for the principle of flexibility that was largely absent in the eyes of all stakeholders. The level of CBE implementation varied, from the level of starting competence-based to that of largely competence-based education. This st