Skill Development through Competency-Based Education

Abstract

This study compares the efficacy of experimental, competency-based methods of teaching the interpersonal skills of empathic communication, respect, and genuineness with traditional didactic methods. An experimental design using randomly-chosen experimental and control groups of first-year graduate students was employed. Experimental conditions involved communication laboratories consisting of didactic and experiential learning opportunities organized in a systematic and sequential fashion. The findings supported the hypothesis that the experimental groups would significantly outperform the control groups on the criterion variable. A second hypothesis, that the control groups would not achieve significant gains, was refuted.