The Dreyfus Model
Introduction:
Dreyfus brothers have stated a theory which depicts the stages of an individual's progression in achieving professional expertise. They have been broken down into a series of five stages: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. The phenomenological model states that an expertise in any skill and medical skill, in particular, cannot be captured by the rule-based expert system. It argues that the expertise is said to be an unconscious and automatic performance which cannot be programmed. Thus, the progression is explained to be a gradual transition from a strict rule adherence to an intuitive mode of judgement. The authur assumes that intuition arises though expertise. Thus an expert system would not be able to rise over the level of competence. Dreyfus emphasises on experience (non-analytical) over rules(analytical).
The main theme revolves around the following five stages:
The Novice:
Dreyfus Model explains that a novice should follow memorise and follow rules without feeling any responsibility of judgement or perception. He would need to be monitored either by self-observation or through instructional feedback. This would help the novice concentrate and internalise the rules and procedures. Dreyfus believes that the task environment is decomposed into context-free features so that a beginner can easily follow the instructions without actually knowing the desired skill. In this stage the beginner is merely following rules, this will not be helpful in a real life situation.
Advanced Beginner:
At this stage, the beginner gains experience in real life scenarios and starts understanding the surrounding environment with its contextual features. At this stage, he starts recognizing the additional aspects of the situation. This helps in developing a ‘instructional maxim’ through which non situational features are recognized by the novice. The learning still occors in a detached analytical frame of mind.
Competence:
Competence is achieved when the advanced beginner starts gaining experience in real life situations. According to Dreyfus, in order to achieve comptence the beginner has to put in their emotions in their work. If they seek the general rules and try to take a detached decision then he would go back to the advanced beginner stage. Also, the individual starts applying the principles formulated by the instructors, which dictate the actions in the real life situations. Competence is achieved only when the individual starts accepting the consequence of his actions. This would help him realise his mistakes and would shape him towards becoming a expert.

Proficiency:
At this stage, the individual has gained enough experience to understand the various situations and the many reactions to those situations. The individual at this stage uses intuition to realize “what” is happening and then uses the memorized principle or maxims to solve the problem and decide the appropriate reaction in that specific situation. He also uses prior experience which provides a pattern for future recognition of similar situations and similar perpectives.
Expertise:
A proficient performer, who no longer needs principles and maxims to judge situations and works intuitively towards any situation would be called an Expert. Expertise is achived when a proficient performer has seen many situations all similar in respect to the plan and perspective but requires different actions. This actions are taken intuitively and does not require the need of thinking about the action or the consequence of any situation. Thus, an expert would perform the task at hand without actually knowing the principles used in it. Therefore, a expert system would not be able to achieve expertise over an expert as an expert himself wouldn’t know the rules he or she is using. If the expert is forced to remember the rules then he or she will regress to the level of a beginner.Although, according to the model, there is no higher level of mental capacity than expertise, the expert experiences moments of intense absorption in his work, during which his performance surpasses even its usual high level.
Conclusion:
The Dreyfus brothers propose that intuition is the endpoint of learning and a key characteristic of expertise. One with a lot of experience who produces almost immediately appropriate perspectives, who thinks intuitively, not analytically, and who ceases to pay conscious attention to his performance. This can be true at most of the skill based learning like driving, cooking etc. The Dreyfus model also explains the reason for the change in perspective as we become more familiar with any skill. This model can even provide an understanding about the level of development in a certain skill. Dreyfus, convinces us that the usage of fool-proof rules would not be useful, as in many instances it would need to take a deviation from those set-rules. Therefore, an expert system would never be able to achieve an edge over the expert himself.
Consider a software engineer, for instance. While trying to locate a bug in the code, a beginner will have to go through the whole program line after line but an expert with a few years of experience would know exactly where to find the bug in the program and how it could be fixed. It is the experience which helps the expert intuitively pick the exact location of the bug. This cannot be taught or instructed in a rule based format. Therefore, I believe that the Dreyfus model can explain the acquisition of skills of any kind.