ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the concepts from the expanded didactic triangle for an exploration and discussion of students’ conceptions of competencies and knowledge areas of significance for becoming a police officer. The results relate to the differences in the educational systems between the countries in terms of eligibility requirements, length of education, educational goals, the content and the staff composition. We suggest that these variations in conditions mean that different groups of students are recruited with various expectations upon beginning their studies. This may explain why students from the Continental and Anglo-Saxon educational systems value practice-oriented knowledge and skills more compared to students from the Nordic system. Furthermore, the Nordic countries based their police education on the principle that new police officers should be generalists, while the police in the other countries are more specialized. With this follows that students in the Nordic countries develop a broader range of knowledge. Most importantly, the results point to the complexity in understanding and explaining the outcomes of educational processes and to the difficulties in comparing educational systems in different contexts.
