Liaison Report: APA's Board of Educational Affairs
Cathi Grus, Ph.D
Over past two decades professional psychology has increasingly devoted attention to the issue of competence as demonstrated by a number of meetings, task forces, and scholarly writings that have set about to outline core competencies and address the issue of assessment of competence. The work of ADPTC on the Practicum Competencies Outline has been recognized as one of the more seminal events. To further advance the competencies movement the APA Board of Educational Affairs (BEA) with advisement by the Council of Chairs of Training Councils in 2005 authorized the creation of the Assessment of Competency Benchmarks Work Group. The formation of this group occurred as part of a policy statement approved by APA’s Council of Representatives in 2006 regarding when in the sequence of doctoral education licensure eligibility might occur which affirmed the need for the articulation of developmentally sequenced education and training competencies and methods for their assessment.
The Work Group met for two days in September 2006 and developed a draft document that identified benchmarks of competence that were graduated to reflect the development of competence across the sequence of education of training and methods of assessing their acquisition. The work group focused on four level of training readiness for practicum, readiness for internship, readiness for entry to practice, and readiness for advanced practice and specialization.
The Benchmarks document has been undergoing further editing will soon be posted on the APA website for public comment (www.apa.org/ed). Responses will be utilized to enhance the content and application of the document. In addition, the APA Board of Educational Affairs authorized a meeting of another group of individuals with expertise in the area of competence to do the following; develop tool kits related to the assessment of competence to assist education and training programs, to discuss next steps with the Benchmarks document, to begin to address the question of promising educational practices leading to competence, and to engage in strategic planning around competency initiatives for BEA to consider.
