Identifying the Components of Competency-based Education in Technical and Vocational High Schools: A Mixed- Method Study

This study was conducted with the aim of discovering the components of competency-based education to be used in technical and vocational high schools. This research had a mixed method (qualitative-quantitative) and in terms of purpose was applied study. The participants in the qualitative phase were 15 education experts and professors, selected using purposive sampling. The research tool was a semi-structured interview, and data were analyzed through content coding and analysis. The researchers, participants, and education experts reviewed the data to verify its validity, and for reliability, the agreement coefficient between the coders and the reliability of the retest was used (78% & 82%). The study population in the quantitative phase consisted of 1373 teachers and principals from technical and vocational high schools in Qom province. The sample included 273 participants who were selected using Sample Power software based on relative stratified sampling. The data were collected using a researcher-made questionnaire based on the findings of the qualitative phase whose face and content validity was assessed by two indicators CVI and CVR and its reliability was calculated using Cronbach's alpha. Descriptive and inferential statistics (exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis) were used to analyze the data via SPSS24 and Smart-PLS20. The findings showed that the competency-based education contains the following four components: knowledge, applied-scientific skills, communicative skills, and attitude. Influential factors included educational; cultural factors; measures taken by the Ministry of Education and economic factors. The fitness of the model revealed that all the factors identified managed to predict 0.71 of the competency-based education variable. The model also showed acceptable goodness of fit (GOF=0.52).