From Disposition to Knowledge:The Cognitive Drift in European VET Learning Outcomes

Abstract

The article analyses how learning outcomes describing transversal key competences are formulated in six European VET systems. This question follows a related article in this issue (Dębowski et al., 2024), which examined where such competences sit in VET curricula and assessment, and why they are almost absent from certification. A corpus of 725 learning-outcome statements from programme documents of Austria, France, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Slovakia was coded on two frames at once, independently by two coders: the EQF knowledge / skills / responsibility and autonomy descriptors and the Bloom–Krathwohl cognitive / psychomotor / affective domains; 684 of the statements carry a category annotation and enter the analyses reported here. The main results hold under each coder’s separate pass, and the one coder-sensitive figure is flagged in the text. The article documents the drift from disposition towards the cognitive domain. On the EQF descriptors the corpus looks like a corpus of skills; on the Bloom–Krathwohl domains three quarters of it is cognitive and 1.5 per cent psychomotor, because the EQF skills category merges the two: within it, cognitive statements outnumber psychomotor ones forty-six to one. Almost a quarter of the corpus is affective. On the EQF frame, responsibility and autonomy accounts for barely a fifth of statements, far less than one might expect for competences built on initiative and self-direction. After adjusting for differences in subject matter, national writing style divides the six countries into two groups of three: those whose certification covers general as well as vocational education write transversal competences more dispositionally, and those whose certification is vocational-only write them more cognitively. The study shows that EQF-based monitoring cannot detect cognitive drift, and links national styles of description to the architecture of certification. In doing so, it extends the related article’s commensuration account earlier in the policy process: the outcome statement, not the exam, is where a disposition first becomes a gradable proposition.