The Dual-Ascent Competency Model™: Structurally Separating Developmental Skill-Building from Workforce-Ready Mastery Demonstration in Competency-Based Education Credentials

Introduction

Competency-based education (CBE) has grown exponentially across higher education over the last decade (Nodine, 2016). CBE programs articulate learning outcomes as competencies — knowledge, skills, and abilities required to function professionally within a given domain — and award credentials based on demonstrated mastery. Compared with traditional credit-hour models, CBE credentials promise transparency, employer engagement, and learner autonomy (Johnstone & Soares, 2014). The emergence of diverse CBE program models — from direct assessment to project-based portfolio pathways to employer-developed workforce certificates — attests to widespread belief in competency as an organizing principle that links the education-employment divide (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2019).

Despite this growth, the structural architectures underlying CBE program designs have received limited attention from scholars and theoreticians. In their call for conceptual research to inaugurate the Competency-Based Education Research Journal, DeBacker et al. (2024) identified a persistent gap in the literature regarding the definition and refinement of CBE theory and the development of CBE frameworks. They specifically noted that although research steadily documents CBE implementation across contexts, fundamental theoretical questions — including the underlying logic and value proposition of competency-based models — remain unresolved.

In response, this article introduces the Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ to address a core theoretical question: if CBE credentials demonstrate mastery, how should competency development be structured to show valid learner readiness?

The article proceeds in six parts. First, it reviews key literature in learning theories, assessment validity, programmatic assessment, and CBE programs, establishing that current programs use single-layer competency schemas that do not separate developmental skill-building from mastery demonstration. Second, it constructs a structural theory of change using Kane’s (1992, 2013) argument-based model, Messick’s (1989) unified validity theory, and van der Vleuten and Schuwirth’s (2005) programmatic assessment, demonstrating how Dual-Ascent’s two-layer separation addresses these validity concerns. Third, it defines eight design principles for practical implementation. Fourth, it describes a working application in a regulated training environment. Fifth, it examines stakeholder implications. Sixth, it proposes a research agenda for empirical testing.

Literature Review

Many disciplines inform the foundational theories and practices of competency-based education today. This review covers four main areas: (a) learning progression and skill acquisition theories, (b) assessment validity frameworks, (c) research on programmatic assessment, and (d) CBE program archetypes. Together, these sources describe how competency develops and is measured. They consistently describe developmental and mastery progression but do not structurally define or separately track these aspects of competency acquisition.

Learning Progression and Skill Acquisition Theory

The idea that learning outcomes should be structured as developmental progressions, gaining complexity over time, is well established in education. Educational psychologists frequently draw on the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986) as a foundational framework for gradual competency development through skill mastery (Peña, 2010). Mastery develops through five stages of increasing competence — from novice to advanced beginner, competent practitioner, proficient practitioner, and expert — which are qualitatively, not quantitatively, different (Benner, 1984).

Van Merriënboer and Kirschner’s (2018) four-component instructional design (4C/ID) model explains how skill development can be structured. Learners build competence by practicing increasingly complex whole tasks (van Merriënboer et al., 2002). This approach distinguishes content that develops supporting knowledge from procedural instruction, thereby embedding developmental objectives within applied activities (van Merriënboer & Kirschner, 2018). Research shows learners’ pathways through domains are not linear. Current position depends on previously attained milestones that differ from final competencies (Confrey et al., 2014; Duschl et al., 2007).

Later work formalized progression in learning outcomes. Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) revision of Bloom’s taxonomy orders objectives hierarchically, requiring mastery of lower-order competencies before higher-order demonstrations. Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) backward design framework suggests starting with mastery targets and working backward to required knowledge and skills. Heritage (2008) highlights learning progressions as a bridge between instruction and outcomes.

Collectively, these theories show that competency is a developmental process: learners advance through stages requiring increasingly complex knowledge, skills, and abilities in pursuit of terminal mastery. Each framework implicitly or explicitly acknowledges a two-step process from skill development to real-world application. However, current learning progression theories stop short of explicitly structuring or independently assessing these developmental and mastery stages as distinct elements of competency documentation (Bok et al., 2018).

Notably, the non-linearity finding in this literature is under-exploited. If learners’ pathways through a domain are genuinely non-linear (Confrey et al., 2014), then an architecture that models progression as a single ordered sequence misrepresents the phenomenon it claims to record. This observation motivates the differentiated entry and egress principle developed later in this article.

Assessment Validity Frameworks

Educational measurement scholars have long asked what competency assessments truly measure. Validity frameworks from the 20th century shape evidence-based assessments today. Kane’s (1992) argument-based approach shifted validity from test quality to the defensibility of inferences from test results. Assessments let designers draw inferences: performance scores generalize to domain performance, support claims about competence, and influence high-stakes decisions (Kane, 2006, 2013). Validation requires evidence for each inference. Cook et al. (2015) offer a guide to using Kane’s framework in health professions education.

Building on this foundational work, Messick’s (1989) unified validity argument further established that construct validity is central to any discussion of assessment quality. Construct validity requires that an assessment measure the construct it claims to measure, that interpretations of test scores be meaningful, and that it consider the consequences of score use. Shepard (1993) applied this reasoning to questions of educational measurement, asserting that valid evidence must consider an assessment’s internal structure as well as its use consequences. The combined influence of these validity scholars culminated in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, which defines validity as a unified argument supported by multiple sources of evidence (American Educational Research Association et al., 2014).

Applied to CBE, these validity principles critically support the Dual-Ascent Model’s theoretical propositions. Specifically, if current credentialing programs use competency records to represent both developmental learning (formative assessments, skill-building activities, developmental milestones) and workforce-ready proof (summative assessments, demonstrations of applied proficiency), then inferring learner readiness for employment from these records is unjustifiable. The extrapolation inference — whether a student demonstrates workforce readiness — is invalid because the record cannot be disaggregated into developmental and mastery components. Assessment records encompass multiple constructs (skill development versus applied proficiency), yet programs do not provide evidence measuring each independently. This issue constitutes a threat to construct validity.

Programmatic Assessment Literature and System-Level Design Considerations

Programmatic assessment research originates in medical education and offers a well-established parallel to current discussions of CBE theory. In educational measurement, discussions of assessment are typically limited to individual assessments or tools. Validity frameworks encourage assessment designers to consider the meaning of scores within a broader longitudinal measurement system. Van der Vleuten and Schuwirth (2005) argued that because no single assessment method could holistically measure complex professional competence, medical education programs should be designed to generate information with a specific purpose — the accumulation of multiple measures would yield more useful data than any single assessment.

This foundation is built on a series of articles describing how assessment should be designed into the curriculum. In systematizing programmatic assessment, Schuwirth and van der Vleuten (2011) noted the importance of distinguishing assessment for learning from assessment of learning; the former accumulates formative evidence that learners can use to self-monitor development, while the latter functions as summative evidence used to make competency judgments (van der Vleuten et al., 2012). Dijkstra et al. (2010) then proposed an analytic framework for designing assessments with programmatic assessment in mind. Heeneman et al. (2015) leveraged this research to understand programmatic assessment’s impact on student learning, finding that it changed how students interpreted feedback and approached self-monitoring. Torre et al. (2019) built on this line of research by explicating theoretical assumptions about programmatic assessment.

In parallel discussions of CBE system design, researchers have noted that current CBE programs tend to operate in either learner-centered designs or completion-centric models (Wiley, 2017). Wiley proposed that learner-centered designs should drive the design of competency systems: learning should be individualized and supported by learners’ individual goals and progress.

The Dual-Ascent Model extends programmatic assessment’s central insight in a specific direction. Programmatic assessment establishes that formative and summative functions are distinct and should be designed distinctly. It does not, however, require that the resulting evidence be stored, tracked, and rendered in separate persistent structures. Dual-Ascent takes that additional step: the functional distinction programmatic assessment identifies is made architectural.

Common Descriptions of Existing CBE Program Models

Current examples of CBE programs frequently described in the literature fall into several archetypes. Institutions operating direct assessment programs define competencies independent of courses and allow learners to attempt aligned assessments at any time, typically recording pass/fail determinations (Kelchen, 2015; Klein-Collins, 2012). Institutions that use project-based portfolio methods define competencies through projects, portfolios, and exhibitions of mastery, requiring learners to create validated demonstrations of proficiency (Rhodes, 2010). Self-paced mastery modules allow learners to progress through smaller units of material at their own pace, enabling them to fully master each competency before moving on to the next (Levine & Patrick, 2019). Employer-articulated workforce certificate programs generally rely on training providers to develop competencies aligned to employer needs, with employers frequently embedded in assessment validation processes (Ennis, 2008).

Common threads run across each of these program archetypes. Despite structural differences in program design and implementation, each describes a progression from developmental learning activities to culminating demonstrations of applied proficiency, whether established by internal program milestones or external validators. Direct assessment learners take assessments only after a period of internal learning. Portfolio program learners build portfolios throughout the learning process. Self-paced learners master knowledge before advancing to assessments. Employer-created programs articulate competencies to align with workforce demands.

C-BEN’s (2017) quality principles for CBE assume learners should progress through competency development. Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile explicitly describes learning progressions as degree-level competency expectations (Adelman et al., 2014). Frameworks for accrediting CBE programs established by the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (2015) assume internal and externally visible milestones will mark students’ progress toward competencies. Biggs and Tang’s (2011) constructive alignment framework mandates coherence between stated learning outcomes, teaching activities, and assessments. Black and Wiliam’s (1998) and Wiliam’s (2011) work on formative assessment identified its requirement for learning. Harden’s (2001) curriculum mapping guide encouraged transparency around these progressions.

Each of these contributions addresses aspects of the developmental-mastery challenge discussed here. However, no existing educational framework explicitly addresses how competency systems should structurally track developmental progress toward proficiency separately from demonstrated mastery. By naming and describing this architectural distinction, the Dual-Ascent Model offers a theoretical response to calls for formal conceptualization of CBE.

The Construct Validity Problem in Current CBE Systems

Few frameworks or scholars have aimed to address this question directly. As discussed previously, each assumes developmental progress will occur. Without a structural way to differentiate between skills acquisition and applied proficiency in CBE credentials, employers must assume recorded competencies reflect incomplete development, applied proficiency, or both.

Consider a competency record that reads “HTML and CSS layout — competency achieved.” An employer cannot determine from that entry whether the learner passed a formative knowledge check after a tutorial, or built a production page under observed conditions and had the result evaluated against a rubric by a qualified assessor. Both events are plausibly recorded the same way. The record is silent on the distinction that matters most to the person reading it.

The problem is construct validity. Messick (1989) defined three essential criteria: a measure must (a) measure the construct it claims to measure, (b) support meaningful interpretations of scores, and (c) account for the consequences of score use. A single-layer competency record satisfies none of these when the underlying entries represent two different constructs.

On the first criterion, the record claims to measure competency but in fact measures an undifferentiated mixture of skill acquisition and applied proficiency — two constructs with different theoretical definitions, different evidentiary bases, and different appropriate uses.

On the second, interpretation is not merely difficult but underdetermined. Two learners with identical records may have arrived there by entirely different evidentiary routes, and nothing in the record permits the reader to distinguish them.

On the third, the consequences fall on the party least equipped to detect the problem. Employers make hiring decisions on the assumption that a competency record signals readiness. When it does not, the cost is borne by the employer who hired on a false signal and by the learner whose genuine mastery is discounted because the credential class has become unreliable.

Kane’s (1992, 2013) framework locates the failure precisely. The extrapolation inference — the step from observed assessment performance to a claim about performance in the target domain — requires evidence that the observed performance is representative of the domain. A record that cannot distinguish practice from demonstration cannot supply that evidence. The inference is not weakly supported; it is unsupported, because the record does not contain the information the inference requires.

This is a structural failure rather than a measurement failure. No improvement in individual assessment quality resolves it. A program could use flawlessly validated instruments throughout and still produce records from which workforce readiness cannot be inferred, because the deficiency lies in how evidence is stored and rendered rather than in how it is collected.

Design Principles for Dual-Layer Competency Architecture

The preceding argument establishes that structural separation is necessary. It does not by itself specify what a compliant architecture must do. This section defines eight design principles that operationalize the model. They are stated as constraints rather than recommendations: an implementation that violates any of them reintroduces the construct validity problem the architecture exists to solve.

Application in Program Settings

The design principles above are abstract by construction, and a theoretical framework that has never been implemented invites the reasonable objection that its constraints may be unsatisfiable in practice. This section describes a working implementation.

A production learning platform built on the Dual-Ascent architecture has been deployed in Private Pilot flight training, a regulated environment governed by published federal standards. That implementation carries 361 mapped competencies — 263 developmental and 98 mastery — across a curriculum of 40 lessons.

The regulated aviation context is a demanding test case, and instructive for that reason. Three properties of the domain exercise the architecture directly.

External criterion standards exist and are published. Federal Airman Certification Standards define performance tolerances independently of any training provider. Competencies map to those published codes, which means the extrapolation inference has an external referent rather than an institutionally defined one. Principle 4 is implemented against tolerance bands derived from those published standards rather than from local convention.

Assessment carries consequential validity in the strongest sense. A learner cleared for solo flight on inadequate evidence is exposed to physical risk. Messick’s (1989) third criterion — consequences of score use — is not an abstraction in this setting, and it motivates a design decision worth noting: for competencies flagged as safety-critical, aggregate performance is reduced to the worst observed tier rather than averaged. A learner who executes a maneuver correctly four times and incorrectly once has demonstrated inconsistency in a critical skill, and an averaging rule would conceal exactly the information that matters.

Provenance is regulatorily mandated. Principle 7 is not a design nicety in a domain where an inspector may ask why a specific learner was authorized for a specific privilege on a specific date. The routing rule that sends practice-venue evidence to the developmental strand and evaluated-venue evidence to the mastery strand is enforced in the data model, and every mastery entry carries the evaluator’s certificate number and the governing regulatory citation.

The differentiated entry principle is exercised routinely in this setting, because flight training populations are heterogeneous by default. Learners arrive with prior instruction from other providers, with documented simulator time, or with adjacent aeronautical experience. Under a ladder model each of these is an administrative exception; under the scaffold model each is ordinary entry at an evidence-determined position.

The same architecture has been extended to apprenticeship and workforce programs and to allied health training, with domain-appropriate terminology substituted at the surface while the underlying structure is unchanged. The claim being made here is modest and specific: the eight principles are jointly satisfiable in a production system operating under external regulatory constraint. Whether the architecture produces better learner or employer outcomes than a single-layer alternative is an empirical question, addressed in the research agenda below.

Implications for Stakeholders

Given its bifurcated approach to competency architecture, the Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ has meaningful effects for each of competency-based education’s primary stakeholder groups. This section analyzes how the model informs improvements across CBE in areas presently underserved by single-layer architectures.

Students and Learners

Students experience the dual-layer model as increased visibility into progress toward competencies and more meaningful signaling through credentials. Because single-layer systems do not differentiate between demonstrated competencies and the learning experiences occurring along the developmental pathway to demonstration, learners often experience competency progression as binary and lacking visibility (Levine & Patrick, 2019). This changes with the addition of the Developmental Ascent layer, which provides students with a record of skill acquisition that can support self-regulated learning behaviors and real-time progress data (Heeneman et al., 2015).

Mastery attainment, as signaled by the Mastery Ascent layer, provides students with a differentiated portfolio of mastery credentials carrying transparent workforce value. For adult learners and career changers who rely on the clarity of credentials to access employment (Bailey et al., 2015), this clarity is consequential. The differentiated entry principle matters particularly to this population: a learner whose prior experience is recognized as entry position rather than processed as an exception encounters a system that models their actual situation.

Faculty, Instructors, and Program Designers

The distinction reduces ambiguity for faculty developing assessments. Without structural separation of developmental from mastery-level work, faculty are required to construct assessments that function both formatively and summatively — an ambition that typically results in assessments that do neither well (Schuwirth & van der Vleuten, 2011). In the Dual-Ascent Model, formative assessments are located in the Developmental Ascent layer, while summative assessments are located in the Mastery Ascent layer. This separation allows instructors to design assessments optimized to their purpose (Kane, 2006; Pellegrino et al., 2001), since the purpose of any given assessment is predetermined by its layer.

The strand-differentiated response principle also changes instructional triage. An instructor who knows that a gap is developmental rather than mastery-level, or the reverse, has meaningful information about what kind of intervention is warranted — information a single-layer record cannot supply.

Administrators and Institutional Leaders

Institutional leaders can leverage the architecture to strengthen accreditation reports, employer partnership proposals, and outcomes reporting. Accreditation bodies have articulated a need for programs to track both the processes students use to develop competence and student competence itself (Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, 2015). Dual-Ascent responds directly to this requirement with its two-layer architecture — one layer capturing the process of learning with granular evidence, and one capturing achievement at the mastery level.

Structural transparency also makes it easier to cultivate employer partnerships, as employers can be shown precisely how mastery determinations are reached and what they mean. Recognizing the central influence of state policy context on CBE program development, DesLauriers et al. (2025) outlined policy domains critical to successful CBE integration at scale; the Dual-Ascent architecture directly addresses policy needs related to competency transparency and credential interpretability.

Employers

Employers benefit from clearer signaling on the Mastery Ascent layer. Signaling theory (Spence, 1973) holds that credentials have labor-market value only to the extent that they communicate clear and reliable information. Current CBE credentials often attempt to meet employers’ interpretive needs through external appendages — employer advisory boards, industry certification crosswalks, competency-to-job-task translation documents — rather than addressing the problem at the structural level of the credential itself (Ennis, 2008).

Dual-Ascent alleviates this tension by producing credentials with a mastery record architecturally separated from developmental data. Employers can view what they need to evaluate — a prospective employee’s demonstrated competencies — without needing to interpret how those competencies were developed. Recent guidance from the OECD (2019) has stressed the need for employer buy-in to competency-based credentials for successful labor market integration, and Tuccio and Meghnagi (2022) identify competency validation as a public policy objective. By producing artifacts designed for employer readability, the Dual-Ascent architecture contributes directly to that objective.

Directions for Future Research

As its primary contribution, the Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ advances a theory that needs validation and exploration. The following section articulates a research agenda organized around four dimensions of research activity, aligned with the categories of CBE research proposed by DeBacker et al. (2024).

Theory Building and Conceptual Research

Theory-building work must explore the boundaries and limitations of the dual-layer architecture. Does conflating developmental and mastery work compromise validity most severely under conditions of high versus low stakes? Are there implementation contexts within CBE where single-layer architectures are sufficient? How does differentiating developmental and mastery work interact with other key conceptual models in CBE, such as personalization and scaffolding, self-paced progression, and prior learning assessment?

Research that positions the Dual-Ascent Model theoretically among its nearest neighbors — programmatic assessment (van der Vleuten et al., 2012), learning trajectories (Confrey et al., 2014), constructive alignment (Biggs & Tang, 2011) — will be critical to clarifying its contribution to and departure from existing theory. The scaffold-versus-ladder distinction in particular invites theoretical scrutiny: it makes a strong claim about the structure of competency development that could be tested against learning trajectory research.

Design and Architecture Research

A secondary line of inquiry involves describing how programs build out the two layers across institutional contexts. Given sufficient variation in implementation, how is the Dual-Ascent architecture maintained across direct assessment programs, project-based portfolio programs, self-paced progression models, and employer-articulated workforce programs?

Particular attention should be paid to how competency recording systems retain structural integrity across layers, as this technical component poses the greatest potential obstacle to existing institutional technology capacity. How are differentiated credential artifacts designed to maximize employer readability — dual-layer transcripts, tiered digital badges, dual-layered competency portfolios? Answering these questions builds on a nascent research literature concerning credential transparency (Ahn et al., 2014; Gibson et al., 2015).

Implementation Research

Further work should explore the conditions that enable implementation. What are the capacity and affordance requirements for adopting a two-layer model versus a one-layer model? Implementations in workforce certificate programs with existing employer advisory boards could provide a high-feasibility entry point with embedded opportunities for employer research.

Apprenticeship programs are a particularly promising site, since their existing structure — on-the-job training aligned with related classroom instruction — already parallels the two-layer model, and their regulatory frameworks already require documentation of both. Studying how the Dual-Ascent Model aligns with and confronts those systems would test the architecture against an established practice that arrived at a similar separation by different means.

Institutional capacity, faculty development, technological capacity, and process-level change management are all critical lenses through which implementation should be studied.

Efficacy and Effectiveness Research

Finally, does the Dual-Ascent architecture actually yield more valid, transparent, and actionable data on learners’ competencies? Studies comparing equivalent programs using single-layer architectures with programs that intentionally separate developmental from mastery work — measuring employer satisfaction with credential interpretability, learner self-regulation, validity evidence for assessments, and labor market outcomes — would help answer this question.

Does the introduction of a Dual-Ascent framework meaningfully affect learner outcomes such as completion, employment, and credential recognition? Do employers perceive dual-layered transcripts differently from single-layer transcripts? Employer focus groups would be a reasonable first approach to the latter. Studies designed around these questions would contribute evidence supporting or refuting the model’s fundamental assertion.

I offer this research agenda openly. Although the Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ is a branded term, the underlying framework is proposed as shared scholarly work for the field. Its longevity as a theoretical intervention will be determined by how well it generates empirical evidence. DeBacker et al.’s (2024) priorities for the future of CBE research map directly to the four foundational areas of inquiry established here, particularly their calls for conceptual grounding, description of implementation variations, and efficacy research that disaggregates outcomes by program model.

Conclusion

This article has proposed the Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ as a theoretical contribution to competency-based education. Through literature review, structural analysis, and stakeholder examination across four bodies of literature — learning theory, assessment validity, programmatic assessment, and predominant CBE program models — it established that competency-based educators have long understood the progression from skill development to skill mastery but have never operationally resolved that progression through a dual-layered competency architecture. The Dual-Ascent Competency Model™ addresses this by explicitly separating Developmental Ascent, the acquisition of discrete skills, from Mastery Ascent, the demonstration of competency at the mastery level, into two independently tracked layers.

The theoretical justification derives from Kane’s (1992, 2013) argument-based validity framework, Messick’s (1989) unified concept of validity, and van der Vleuten and Schuwirth’s (2005) programmatic assessment model, which together support the argument that conflating developmental work with mastery work is a validity failure carrying tangible costs for learners, employers, educators, and institutions.

Eight design principles were defined to make the architecture operationalizable, and a working implementation in regulated flight training was described to establish that those principles are jointly satisfiable in production. Among the principles, differentiated entry and egress deserves particular emphasis: the Dual-Ascent Model is a scaffold rather than a ladder, admitting multiple entry points, per-competency positioning, and learner-specific rates. This property is what makes the architecture compatible with differentiated instruction and recognition of prior learning, and it is the property most easily lost when the model is reduced to a diagram of ascending strands.

The Dual-Ascent Model is not novel because it distinguishes between skill development and skill mastery. Nearly every learning theory and assessment framework in education makes that distinction. Nor is it innovative because it visualizes that relationship. Its contribution is structural: it establishes a means of formally and persistently separating the progression toward competence from the demonstration of competence, through a named, operationalized, and independently tracked set of architectural components. As competency education advances to scale, further iteration will be needed and is invited. Until then, the Dual-Ascent architecture offers educators and learners a vocabulary and a structural logic for designing, building, and credentialing educational programs with improved validity, transparency, and value for all stakeholders.

The frameworks described here are documented in applied form, alongside the course quality standards and evidence-capture layer built on them, at Competency Architecture.

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