As the OECD officially expressed the need to cultivate competency
through the DeSeCo project, the direction of school education is
changing with a focus on improving competency. Movement to newly
adjust the goals and directions of the school curriculum to develop
learners'' core competencies is taking place around the world,
including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Reflecting these
demands of the times, Korea also introduced the concept of
competency for the first time in the 2015 revised curriculum
announced in September 2015. The 2015 revised curriculum aims to cultivate six core capabilities,
such as creative and convergent talents, suggesting self-management,
knowledge information processing, creative thinking, aesthetic and
emotional, communication, and community. As core competencies are
reflected in the national-level curriculum, there is a growing
movement to design and practice curriculum centered on competencies
in the school field. However, the reality is that there are still many difficulties in
designing and implementing a competency-based curriculum in the
educational field. What is being talked about as the biggest difficulty
is that the substance of competency is ambiguous. Since the
substance is ambiguous, whether competency is an individual''s
attribute, result of an action, or action, it takes on various forms
depending on the researcher or organization that defines it. This
causes confusion for teachers in the field. The ambiguity of
competency, which includes various views in a broad sense, was
accepted as a poor epistemological foundation for competency (So
Kyung-hee, 2007), which inevitably accompanied confusion over how
to apply it in the actual educational field. In fact, teachers in the field
recognize that practicing the competency curriculum needs a different
way than existing classes, but they are not sure about specific plans.
Research schools that operated the competency curriculum examined by
case analysis in this study applied Backward Design as a way to overcome
the ambiguity of these competencies and find specific action plans. Krogh and Ruth (1996) said competency is viewed as an event
rather than an asset. This means that competency does not exist in
person like a car, but only when knowledge and skills encounter
specific tasks to be solved. The characteristics of this competency
can be integrated into setting up a transfer task so that the transfer
process of understanding can be determined in a practical context to
confirm understanding that is difficult to observe or measure in
backward design. If the competency-based curriculum aims to link
learning and restore the essence of education, backward design also
aims to transfer a true understanding of what it has learned into life,
so the ultimate direction is the same. This study developed and proposed a competency-based school
curriculum based on backward design to overcome the ambiguity of
the competency-based curriculum and to propose a plan to practice it
in the school field. In order to secure the validity of the study,
literature on backward design and competency-based curriculum was
studied, and through this, the relationship between understanding and
competency was defined and the basis for design was secured. In
addition, the direction and implications of design were derived by
analyzing the cases of two domestic schools and British Columbia,
Canada, which were selected as policy research schools requested by
the Ministry of Education and operated competency curriculum. Based
on this, a competency-based school curriculum design plan based on
backward design was devised and significance points in application
were derived. This study has limitations in that it has not yet been applied to the
educational field because it was designed according to elementary
school and a design plan was developed. Therefore, follow-up studies
are needed that can be applied to various schools such as middle and
high schools, and revised and supplemented based on the results