A Model for the Representation of Competences Applied to Student's Knowledge Modeling

A skill is a basic unit for cognitive processing that allows the use of concepts. A competence is the result of the application of a skill on a concept. Competences and their development play a central role in most educational and training programs. This paper presents a formal model for the representation of competences, called Competences Memory Map, an extension of the Memory Map (14), a model capable of representing knowledge in an integrated, simple and flexible way. The model is described using set theory through concept al- gebra and is computationally implementable. The formal description of alge- braic and algorithmic operations over the model, as well as case studies, dem- onstrate that all the model properties hold as expected when dealing with com- plex real knowledge structures.