PhD ceremony Mr. P. Boahin: Competency-Based Training (CBT) in higher education - Towards an implementation in Ghanaian polytechnics

PhD ceremony: Mr. P. Boahin

Dissertation: Competency-Based Training (CBT) in higher education - Towards an implementation in Ghanaian polytechnics

Promotor(s): prof. W.H.A. Hofman

Faculty: Behavioural and Social Sciences

The pressure for change in teaching and learning in the vocational and educational training (VET) systems is becoming increasingly crucial due to reasons such as global economics, industry restructuring and policy initiatives from governments. In this regard, the development and application of skill standards derived from the curricula of competency-based training (CBT) is one major teaching and learning approach that is believed to have a strong potential to increase skill levels, reduce unemployment rate, increase productivity and to achieve international competitiveness.

To this end, the curricula of five study programmes run by polytechnics in Ghana have been redesigned as competency based; they are being run on a pilot basis but could be replicated in other study programmes.

The results showed that study programmes involving student-centred learning have significant effects on the acquisition of employability skills. Furthermore, we found a strong, statistically significant effect of industry training on the acquisition of employability skills, consistent with previous studies. In contrast with our expectation based on previous findings, we found no statistically significant effect of gender on the acquisition of employability skills. However, pre-education had significant effects on employability skills even though no such evidence appeared in different study programmes. As we posited, students in vocational and technical institutes acquired higher levels of employability skills.