Providing the Meta- Model of Development of Competency Using the Meta-Ethnography Approach: Part 1: Reviewing the Available Models of Competency Development

Background and Purpose: The literature review over the past few decades is a reflection of a global specific move towards the competency and evaluation of outcomes based education and the importance of this type of education is to the extent that Harden introduced "competency-based education" through a focus on outcomes and competencies as the most important trend in the medical education in the past decade. Due to the particular importance of competency-based education and the need to review the competency -based curriculum to be based on the competencies, the need to review the design of the curriculum is completely evident. But a question arises here that "Is there a comprehensive model that can be drawn for the development of competency in order to design new curriculum based on it?"In this study, we have tried to develop models to assess and synthesize existing development models, achieve to design a comprehensive meta-model for competency development.Methods: Meta-ethnography is a useful method for the synthesis of qualitative researches which is used in order to develop models that interpret findings in several studies. Considering that the aim of this study was finally to provide a meta-model of competency development, in the first step of meta-ethnography, first three steps and also a criticism was conducted on the available competency   development models, for this purpose, literature review was also done to achieve competency development models. The models obtained by search were studied precisely and the models were presented based on first hand description of the by the developer(s), then offering critiques were extracted from the literature and the critical of researcher was finally provided.Results: After determination of the research question and characterization of synthesis focus, inclusion criteria and quality assessment of search were conducted and eight competency development models were selected and a precise investigation has been done on each.Conclusions: Considering the importance of competency-based training at the global level and the urgent need to review the existing curriculum and competency-based curriculum design, the analyzed models can provide the basis for synthesis of a meta-model for competency development and curriculum.