Measuring Professional Competence

Abstract

The PISA consortium with its research design and methodology has set new standards for educational research and fundamentally changed the cooperation between VET research and VET policy. This is mainly due to the fact that policy makers and the scientific community alike accepted the PISA methodology almost without any reservation. This is a new situation, which since then poses a challenge for VET researchers to extend competence diagnostics to ever wider fields of application. It was thus no surprise when already in 2003 the idea of a VET PISA was proposed for the first time, to be followed in Germany shortly afterwards by a feasibility study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Economics on an international VET PISA (cf. Baethge et al. 2006).