Driving Cultural and Educational Shift from Focusing on Academic Knowledge to Holistic Competencies

Abstract

There is no doubt that education puts heavy emphasis on academic knowledge as reflected by grades on transcripts. However, as the need for education to also address the personal and social growth of students continues to proliferate, attention is shifting towards graduate attributes which many institutions have now also included in their mission statements of educational aims (Chan & Luk, 2013). In this presentation, a framework for the development of holistic competencies based on the concept of “avoider” and “engager” on student approaches to develop (Chan and Yeung, in press) in oppose to the well-known deep and surface approaches on student approaches to learning (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999; Lizzio, Wilson, & Simons, 2002) will be discussed. We will also discuss how holistic competencies can be assessed (if it should be assessed at all) and how can students document these learning outcomes as part of their learning process through a pedagogical driven system.