Meta-learning focuses on the student’s reflection, adaptation of learning methods, and understanding of process. The goal for students is to become aware of, and increasingly able to correct and reflect on, their learning process. To set goals related to meta-learning, we developed the “The five innovation competencies”. The model was developed to address the need for a formative assessment tool. It provides an overall overview of the innovation competencies and associated learning goals. It should be regarded as a dialogue tool for a constructive didactic conversation about students’ innovation competencies.
The description of innovation competencies focuses on the students’ ability to act in the process rather than on the students’ products. When assessing students’ innovation competencies, it is therefore not necessarily important to look at whether the products or ideas that the students develop are innovative. On the other hand, it is essential to look at how students act and work with issues or challenges from a field of practice. Thus, a student can be competent in innovation, even if the student’s ideas or solution proposals are not new. If the core in the concept of innovation related to learning is that the students can use relevant professional knowledge to come up with proposals that can improve a practice and create value for a recipient, then innovation competencies can be defined as follows (Nielsen, 2015)
A student has innovation competencies if the student, alone or together with others, can:
- generate ideas for solutions to a problem from an existing practice based on relevant knowledge.
- evaluate these ideas in terms of their usefulness, feasibility and potential value creation and use this assessment in the selection and execution of ideas.
- convey these ideas to different recipients
The figure illustrates the understanding of the overall concept of innovation competencies. Innovation competencies contain five basic innovation competencies, which in connection with iterative processes and other teaching can be used to formulate learning goals or be seen as signs of learning (Andersen, 2020)
As mentioned earlier, the concept of innovation competencies can be described through five basic competencies. The five competencies can be broken down into three sub-competencies. The sub-competencies provide a direct description of the innovative student’s actions. For each of the 15 sub-competencies, the PBL Competencies Model indicates several suggestions for signs of learning. In our experience, the PBL Competencies Model can help teachers to become aware of when students’ innovative competencies are brought into play.
We have used the model to:
- Reflect on and assess students’ innovative ompetencies
- Track student progress over time
- Identify achieved learning goals and set new learning goals.