Mathematical competence framework : an aid to identifying understanding?

Research into the teaching of mathematics to engineering students to promote their conceptual understanding (Jaworski and Matthews 2011) has shown the problematic nature of planning for and identifying understanding. I review the project briefly and introduce the idea of competencies from the Danish project, KOM (translated as Competencies and Mathematical Learning). Through the medium of designing inquirybased tasks for students and use of the competency framework for analysis of tasks, I consider the relevance of such a competency-based analysis and its usefulness (or otherwise) for recognising student understanding. This leads to important questions for further research of a developmental nature.