In their 1986 book, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer, Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus describe five stages of skill acquisition: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert.
The salient difference among these stages are elaborated in the table below.
| Expert |
In normal situations in their domain of expertise, experts tend to not explicitly make decisions and solve problems; instead, “they do what normally works” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 31). When they reflect about their performances, they reflect upon the suitability of the intuitions they are considering acting upon. The emotional investment of the expert is the highest of the five stages. |
| Proficient |
Learners’ plans are often chosen through experience-based intuition, and their actions within a plan are guided by that same type of intuition. While learners can explain their decisions and actions in an analytic manner, the methodical and analytic reasoning which typifies the performances of learners at lower stages of skill acquisition have been replaced with rapid, fluid performances in which the learners’ emotional involvements are quite high. |
| Competent |
Learners engage situations sufficiently complex so as to require the learners to choose and implement a plan to manage an otherwise overwhelming situation. Learners’ plans are guided by a goal, and learners perceive their situations as collections of facts to be managed analytically. Because outcomes are now determined by a learner’s choice of plan, a competent learner’s emotional investment is much higher than that of a novice. |
Advanced
Beginner |
Learners begin to recognize new elements in the overall situation, and they begin to develop relationships between those elements and their task performance. Learners judge their performance not only upon a rule-based execution, but also on prior experiences. |
| Novice |
Elements to be learned are largely perceived as being independent of an overall situation. Relationships among elements are ruled-based and largely independent of an overall situation. Learners judge their performances based upon their execution of the learned rules; their emotional investment in the overall situation is low. |
The Thirteen Challenges website presents a conceptual model of writing useful for first-year college students, novice writers in the eyes of the academy and future employers. |
