Efeito da exposição a um manual no aprendizado de descrição de competências

Abstract

Authors have been arguing in favor of the comprehension and the description of competencies as observable behavior, and not as capacities people have that serve as a base for their behavior. Nevertheless, literature related to competency describing remains little explored, and it is common still, in the organizational and in the educational fields, competency descriptions that allow multiple interpretations, or do not allow direct observation and measurement. Thus, the current work’s goal is to evaluate the effects of a manual for competency description based on observable behavior upon the performance on a competency description task. Two Studies were carried out for this goal. In the 1st Study, participants were required to read the chapters of the manual and, after doing so, they were submitted to a competency description task based on audio-recorded descriptions of activities from various fields of knowledge. In the 2nd Study, participants were submitted to the same task, but the with audios that described activities closer to the participants’ everyday activities. A multiple-probe design was used in both studies, divided in baseline measurement, probes, manual reading, generalization and follow-up, and participants performance was analyzed in terms of their scores in the tasks and the amount of description mistakes made. The results of both studies showed a progressive increase in the participants scores and a decrease in the frequency of description mistakes, consistent with the gradual contact with the manual’s chapters, indicating that, although the manual was not effective in reducing description mistakes to zero, it was, nevertheless, effective to improve participants’ global performance in describing competencies to a high level.