A methodological approach to key competencies in informatics

Competencies in informatics have traditionally been fixed, defined, and identified either normatively by groups of experts or as derivations from educational standards of one of various external fields. This paper presents a novel approach, which is methodologically driven by Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA). My goal was to derive key competencies in informatics from previously established educational approaches in informatics. First I consulted a number of textbooks on didactics in informatics and compiled a list of possible candidates for competencies. The list was used as a QCA category set, by which six different educational approaches were analyzed. Every time a new competency was identified, it was added to the category set and a new iteration of the analyzing process was commenced using the newly enhanced list of competencies. Since the material for the analysis consisted of research documents of existing educational approaches for school education, the result was a collection of competencies with the property of maximal prevalence across the range of educational concepts. A final refinement step identified those competencies which have connections to all of the four main categories of informatics, namely theoretical informatics, technical informatics, practical informatics, and applied informatics. These competencies were termed "Key Competencies in Informatics".