Summary

In acquiring a skill by means of instruction and experience, the student normally passes through five developmental stages which we designate novice, competence, proficiency, expertise and mastery. We argue, based on analysis of careful descriptions of skill acquisition, that as the student becomes skilled, he depends less on abstract principles and more on concrete experience. We systematize and illustrate the progressive changes in a performer's ways of seeing his task environment. We conclude that any skill training procedure must be based on some model of skill acquisition, so that it can address, at each stage of training, the appropriate issues involved in facilitating advancement.

References

• A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill aquisition - the original document as PDF from dtic.mil.

Resources

• Andrew Hunt in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning also uses the levels from Benner and maps them to software development.
• Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, by Pete Goodliffe
• From Novice to Expert (Dr. Patricia E. Benner) - Describes 5 levels of nursing experience as: Novice, Advanced beginner, Competent, Proficient, and Expert. In contrast to the Dryfus Model, this model introduces the Advanced Beginner level and removes the Mastery level.