Dreyfus model of skill acquisition
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The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition (or the "Dreyfus Skill Model") describes distinct stages learners pass through as they acquire new skills. It has been used in fields such as education, nursing, operations research, and many more. Brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus originally proposed the model in 1980 in an 18-page report on their research at the University of California, Berkeley, Operations Research Center for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research.[1] The model was elaborated in more detail in their book Mind Over Machine (1986/1988).[2] A more recent (2021) articulation, "Revisiting the Six Stages of Skill Acquisition," authored by Stuart E. Dreyfus and B. Scot Rousse, appears as Chapter 1 in an edited volume called Teaching and Learning for Adult Skill Acquisition: Applying the Dreyfus and Dreyfus Model in Different Fields.[3] This volume attests to the wide variety of domains in which the Skill Model has been corroborated and influential.
The fully developed model proposes that a student passes through five distinct stages of novice, advanced beginner, competence, proficiency, and expertise, with a sixth stage of mastery available for highly motivated performers.
Animating the Skill Model is a common experience: that in acquiring new skills, learners must first rely on rules and procedures, and think about what they are doing; but as they gain experience and progress towards expertise, they gradually let go of the rules and procedures, and no longer need to think or deliberate about what to do.
According to the Skill Model, in the first three stages learners rely heavily on rules and procedures that tell them what to do and enable them to cope with an often-confusing array of details, what the Model calls "context-free features" of a situation. Think of the read-outs on the speedometer and other gauges in an automobile, or the specific, objective descriptions and measurements of unfamiliar ingredients and cooking times called for in a recipe.
As learners progress through the stages and gain experience, they increasingly let go of rules and procedures and instead act more and more from a direct, holistic discrimination of what is going on in their situation. The experienced driver, for example, does not need to explicitly note that there is a curve ahead, recall and apply the rule that one should decelerate to 15mph when entering a curve, and then apply a further rule in order to decide whether to hit the brake or lift his foot from the accelerator; rather he "feels in the seat of his pants" that he should slow down through this curve, and he can immediately tell, without consciously appealing to rules, if this is a situation that also calls for hitting the brakes. Having successfully navigated many similar situations, the experienced driver can take account of sudden, unexpected changes in the situation like a light turning red, or the appearance of water on the road, without having to think or apply rules.
The Skill Model refers to this direct, holistic discrimination of what a situation calls for as the performer's "intuition" or "intuitive perspective" on their situation. The emergence of an intuitive perspective for the performer, a direct sense of what is relevant and what this situation calls for, is the hallmark of the stages four and five (proficiency and expertise), according to the Skill Model. For example, beginner and competent cooks will appeal step-by-step to the rules, procedures, and objective measurements of a recipe as they haltingly figure out a dish they can make with the unfamiliar contents of a cupboard. However, "the expert cook, presented with an array of ingredients and kitchen appliances, can see immediately a range of dishes that are possible to create with them, understand the order in which to approach the stages of preparation, and set directly to work prepping the initial ingredients and calibrating the relevant kitchen appliances." [3]
An over-reliance on the conscious application of rules and procedures leads a learner to stall at the stage of competence and prevents intuitive perspectives from emerging. According to the Skill Model, to advance to proficiency and expertise, the learner must take the risk of letting go of the application of rules and procedures, thus involving themselves more directly and emotionally in the unfolding and the outcome of their actions.
Having gained enough experience with how to handle a wide variety of situations, experts act intuitively, without conscious decision-making. As Dreyfus and Dreyfus put it in Mind Over Machine: “when things are proceeding normally, experts don’t solve problems and don’t make decisions; they do what normally works."[2] Experts allow themselves to be immediately guided by the repertoire of intuitive perspectives that they have acquired through training and experience.
Eventually, Dreyfus and Dreyfus added a sixth stage that they termed "mastery." Masters don't rest content with their acquired, conventional expertise, but seek to expand the scope of their intuition, and in some cases they introduce new ways of executing the skill that transform the style of their skill domain.
The Dreyfus Skill Model
[edit]Table 1: Five Stages of Skill Acquisition[3]
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Components | Perspective | Action | Commitment |
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Context-free | None | Analytic | Detached |
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Context-free and situational | None | Analytic | Detached |
| 3. Competent | Context-free and situational | Chosen | Analytic | Detached choice of saliences and of action; involved in outcome |
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Situational and context-free | Experienced | Analytic | Involved experience of saliences; detached choice of action |
| 5. Expert | Situational and context-free | Experienced | Intuitive | Involved |
Criticism of the model
[edit]A criticism of Dreyfus and Dreyfus's model has been provided by Gobet and Chassy,[4][5] who also propose an alternative theory of intuition. According to these authors, there is no empirical evidence for the presence of stages in the development of expertise. In addition, while the model argues that analytic thinking does not play any role with experts, who act only intuitively, there is much evidence that experts in fact often carry out relatively slow problem-solving (e.g. look-ahead search in chess).
However, the above criticisms are based on a tendentious reading of the published record.[6][7] For example, the criticisms fail to take into account the notion of the “deliberative rationality” of experts, which is a kind of expert reflection in action, as developed in Dreyfus and Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine [8] and further elaborated by Rousse and Dreyfus in "Revisiting the Six Stages of Skill Acquisition." [3]
In turn, the challenge posed by look-ahead search in chess is addressed within the scope of the skill model in a 1982 article by Stuart Dreyfus.[9] With respect to the question of experts calculating into the future, Dreyfus argues that chess is not a suitable example from which to generalize about skillful action at large: “The DeGroot reference to the well-known practice of the chess player of calculating out into the future should not be interpreted as evidence that skilled decision-makers in other domains do likewise. This examination of possible futures becomes feasible in chess because the objective and complete nature of a chess position makes a future position as intuitively meaningful as a present one”(p.151).[9]
See also
[edit]- Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence
- Chris Argyris' concepts of Action learning
- Four stages of competence
- Skill
- Shu Ha Ri
- Merleau Ponty
- Language proficiency, particularly ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines
- Bloom's taxonomy
References
[edit]- ^ Dreyfus, Stuart E.; Dreyfus, Hubert L. (February 1980). "A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition" (PDF). Washington, DC: Storming Media. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 16, 2010. Retrieved June 13, 2010.
- ^ a b Dreyfus, Hubert L.; Dreyfus, Stuart E. (1988). Mind over machine: the power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer (2nd paperback ed.). New York: The Free Pr. pp. 30–31. ISBN 978-0-02-908061-0.
- ^ a b c d Silva Mangiante, Elaine M.; Peno, Kathy; Northup, Jane, eds. (2021). Teaching and learning for adult skill acquisition: applying the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model in different fields. Adult learning in professional, educational, and community settings. Charlotte, NC: INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC. pp. 19–24. ISBN 978-1-64802-500-6.
- ^ Gobet. F. & Chassy, P. (2008). Towards an alternative to Benner’s theory of expert intuition in nursing: A discussion paper. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 45, 129-139.
- ^ Gobet. F. & Chassy, P. (2009). Expertise and intuition: A tale of three theories. Minds and Machines, 19, 151-180.
- ^ Dreyfus, Stuart; Rousse, B. Scot (2018). "Commentary on Fernand Gobet's (2018) "The Future of Expertise: The Need for a Multidisciplinary Approach"" (PDF). Journal of Expertise. 1: 181–183.
- ^ Dreyfus, Stuart (2014). "System 0: The Overlooked Explanation of Expert Intuition". Handbook of Research Methods on Intuition, ed. M. Sinclair. 1: 15–27.
- ^ Dreyfus, Hubert; Dreyfus, Stuart (1988). Mind Over Machine (Second ed.). New York: Free Press. pp. 36–51.
- ^ a b Dreyfus, Stuart (1982). "Formal Models vs. Human Situational Understanding:Inherent Limitations on the Modeling of Business Expertise". Office: Technology and People. 1 (2/3): 133–165. doi:10.1108/eb022609.
Further reading
[edit]- Benner, Patricia (2004). "Using the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition to Describe and Interpret Skill Acquisition and Clinical Judgment in Nursing Practice and Education". Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 24 (3): 188–19. doi:10.1177/0270467604265061. S2CID 131766815.
- Eriksen, Jørgen W. (2010). "Should Soldiers Think before They Shoot?". Journal of Military Ethics. 9 (3): 195–218. doi:10.1080/15027570.2010.510861. S2CID 144067922.