"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. "
"as the student becomes skilled, he depends less on abstract principles and more on concrete experience. "
"Our approach is to take the reliance on everyday familiarity in problem-solving not as an anomaly, but as a pervasive and essential feature of human intelligent behavior. "
"Novice: the instruction process begins by decomposing the task environment into context-free features which the beginner can recognize without benefit of experience. The beginner is then given rules for determining an action on the basis of these features. To improve, the novice needs monitoring, either by self-observation or instructional feedback, so as to bring his behavior more and more completely into conformity with the rule."
"Competence: Competence comes only after considerable experience actually coping with real situations in which the student notes or an instructor points out recurrent meaningful component patterns. "
"These situational components, in terms of which a competent student; understands his environment, are no longer the context-free features used by the novice. A language learner has achieved competence when he no longer hears and produces meaningless streams of sound, but rather perceives meaningful phrases which, when used on appropriate occasions, produce effects by virtue of these meanings. "
"Proficiency: Each whole situation, for the first time, has a meaning which is its relevance to the achievement of a long-term goal. Aspects now appear to be more or lens important (salient) depending upon their relevance to this goal. "
"Expertise: Up to this stage, the performer needed some sort of analytical principle (rule, guideline, maxim) to connect his grasp of the general situation to a specific action. Now his repertoire of experienced situations is so vast that normally each specific situation immediately dictates an intuitively appropriate action. "
"Mastery: masterful performance only takes place when the expert, who no longer needs principles, can cease to pay conscious attention to his performance and can let all the mental energy previously used in monitoring his performance go into producing almost instantaneously the appropriate perspective and its associated action"
As you develop competency, you depend less on abstract principles and more on concrete experience. There are five levels of competency, and they are a function of four "mental activities" . In acquiring a skill, one has to consider and improve their recollection, recognition, decision-making and awareness of aspects of the skill they are practicing.
An expert takes an external model and re-interprets it: in situating the saliency of different aspects one re-orients these principles that are "timeless" and external and make them "present" and internal.
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.
as the student becomes skilled, he depends less on abstract principles and more on concrete experience.
Gestaltists such as [[Kohler]] [3] and phenomenologists such as [[Merleau-Ponty]] [4] have argued that research programs such as behaviorism and cognitivism which attempt to eliminate the everyday perceptual familiarity of the experimental situation reach their conclusion that perception and skills etc. are based on the lawlike combination of elements precisely because they have eliminated the contextual significance, based on past experience, which makes other forms of response possible.
This striking dependence on everyday, concrete, experience in problem-solving seems an anomaly from the point of view of the information processing model of mental activity whose basic assumption is that all cognitive processes are produced by formal manipulation of independent bits of information abstracted from the problem domain.
Our approach is to take the reliance on everyday familiarity in problem-solving not as an anomaly, but as a pervasive and essential feature of human intelligent behavior.
Rather than adopting the currently accepted Piagetian view that proficiency increases as one moves from the concrete to the abstract, we argue that skill in its minimal form is produced by following abstract formal rules, but that only experience with concrete cases can account for higher levels of performance.
Novice: the instruction process begins by decomposing the task environment into context-free features which the beginner can recognize without benefit of experience. The beginner is then given rules for determining an action on the basis of these features. To improve, the novice needs monitoring, either by self-observation or instructional feedback, so as to bring his behavior more and more completely into conformity with the rule.
Competence: Competence comes only after considerable experience actually coping with real situations in which the student notes or an instructor points out recurrent meaningful component patterns.
These situational components, in terms of which a competent student; understands his environment, are no longer the context-free features used by the novice. A language learner has achieved competence when he no longer hears and produces meaningless streams of sound, but rather perceives meaningful phrases which, when used on appropriate occasions, produce effects by virtue of these meanings.
Proficiency: Each whole situation, for the first time, has a meaning which is its relevance to the achievement of a long-term goal. Aspects now appear to be more or lens important (salient) depending upon their relevance to this goal.
Expertise: Up to this stage, the performer needed some sort of analytical principle (rule, guideline, maxim) to connect his grasp of the general situation to a specific action. Now his repertoire of experienced situations is so vast that normally each specific situation immediately dictates an intuitively appropriate action.
Mastery: masterful performance only takes place when the expert, who no longer needs principles, can cease to pay conscious attention to his performance and can let all the mental energy previously used in monitoring his performance go into producing almost instantaneously the appropriate perspective and its associated action.
The development depicted in row 1 first becomes situational when experience-based similarity recognition is achieved. The development in row 2 first becomes holistic when the performer perceives similarity in terms of whole situations. In row 3, the performer refines whole situations to the point that unique decisions intuitively accompany situation recognition without need of conscious calculation. In row 4, the analytical mind, relieved of its monitoring role in producing and evaluating performance, is quieted so that the performer can become completely absorbed in his performance