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What are competencies?
Competencies are the pillars of any Spire program. They are the skills or areas in which students grow by engaging in meaningful curricular and extracurricular opportunities.
What are dimensions?
Dimensions are an optional way for programs to break down a competency into subcategories. For example, a competency like Leadership could be broken down into dimensions such as Team Leadership, Societal Leadership, and Organizational Leadership. The advantage of using dimensions is that they can clarify the meaning of a larger, more abstract concept, or carve out more concrete growth areas.
To learn more about how programs are structuring their competencies and dimensions, checkout these articles:
What are levels?
Regardless of whether a program uses competencies or dimensions, these areas are next fleshed out by 2 or more proficiency levels. Note: if a program uses dimensions, it will not have "competency levels", as students will be advancing in the dimensions, not the competencies.
In addition to a name and ranked order, levels are also the place where program administrators specify the assessment criteria for reaching that level and, optionally, any custom prompts student should answer during the level-up process.