The purpose of the study is to explore how the national curriculum of Denmark was designed for competence development by analyzing Danish and history national curriculum documents and to discuss implications for school and teacher level curriculum design as well as teaching and assessment. I also provided suggestions to improve the curriculum design in Korea. In the national curriculum documents, competence was translated into 'competence goals' and was specified as 'skills and knowledge goals' by taking a designing down approach. The competence goals as well as and skills and knowledge goals are stated in students' performance and presented in different levels on a continuum, revealing the nature of structure of subject. This way of curriculum designing shows clearly what students should know and do from a developmental perspective, and enhances the coherence among different elements of curriculum. To improve the curriculum in Korea, we need to unify competence and goals in curriculum documents, evaluate the relevance of each competence, and make it clear how competencies are related to skills.