In education, there is a growing interest in the concept of competency especially in vocational training and professional development. The concept is strongly associated with the ability to apply knowledge and skills in effective ways in unanticipated situations. In Sri Lanka, a new competency-based mathematics curriculum was introduced in 2007 for grade 6 and the implementation was completed in 2010 for grade 11 as part of a reform process. The main aim of this implementation was to eliminate previous transmission methods of teaching and to assign a transformational role to the teacher. In this study, I analyzed the suitability of this new curriculum as a competency-based curriculum and examined whether it has achieved its objectives. The results showed that the new curriculum was better in elaborating the subject content and teaching methods. However, in a broader sense, it has not fulfilled its objectives as a competency-based curriculum. The analysis led one to conclude that competency-based teaching and learning approaches were superficially introduced in mathematics education in Sri Lanka. The curriculum documents did not properly reflect their intended objectives. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.
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