Skill levels

Competence levels are used to describe the quality of action-relevant skills and attitudes of a person in a professional field or in a narrower area, a domain . This makes it easier to make statements about the learning status , learning steps and learning conditions. For example, in the PISA educational study it can be made clear which proportions of schoolchildren in an age group have which basic skills e.g. B. in the domains dealing with written language or basic mathematical skills .

Five skill levels (Dreyfus model)

An original model for determining expertise is divided into five levels of competence. It begins with the "newbie" and extends through the levels "advanced beginner", "competence" and "dexterity" to the highest level "expert":

Newbie
advanced beginner
Competent
Skilled
Expert

Example nursing

Examples from the field of nursing make the descriptions below more concrete:

First stage

At the first stage "newcomer" ( Novice ) Minimum requirements are not or are not met regularly in the work area. Access to problems and work style appear to be characterized by an inflexible and uncertain acting action, whereby the newcomers may be familiar with some general rules that they apply without sufficient consideration of the exact situation (context-free rules). This corresponds to the fact that, due to a lack of experience, they recognize many details in a situation, but do not perceive them in a meaningful relationship to the overall situation - e.g. B. cannot distinguish between the important, the urgent and the unimportant.

Newcomers hardly identify with the tasks and roles in the field of work, but sometimes act like observers. In the hospital, a newcomer to nursing might e.g. B. the desire to explain an EKG to an experienced person, although from an experienced perspective the point in time seems highly inappropriate because the health of a patient is currently deteriorating acutely. To reach higher levels, newbies need u. a. more experience with real situations in order to be able to link rules and situation aspects with one another. It should be noted that in previously unknown areas of a field of work, people who are experts in a similar field of work in other fields may initially only act at the level of newcomers . However, they may be able to familiarize themselves relatively quickly with the goals and special means in the new area of work ( transfer ).

Second step

Actors on the second level, "advanced beginners", all in all meet the minimum requirements. Their approach to problems and their working style can be characterized by the fact that they follow some useful guidelines when solving tasks, but are sometimes overwhelmed, which can be seen in the form of short-term and relatively rigid reactions to individual subtasks. Advanced beginners perceive many details in situations, whereby recurring components of a typical situation can be recognized and classified. Using the example of nursing, people at this level can be recognized by jumping back and forth between different patients, with short-term reactions to their wishes and care needs. As support for reaching higher levels, it seems advisable to offer advanced beginners the opportunity to formulate rules of action themselves and to guide them in recognizing and differentiating between situation aspects and in setting priorities .

Third step

On the third and middle stage of the model, the "competence" ( Competence ), provide the people medium to perform well in their field of work field or in a domain. Conscious planning and a certain wealth of experience enable them to work efficiently and very flexibly. An overview of the overall situation appropriate to the problems to be solved can be created consciously (analytical procedure). In the example field, nurses take e.g. B. first carry out routine checks on all patients entrusted to them and then work in a meaningful sequence. The simulation of special problem situations could serve as support to reach higher levels .

Fourth stage

As the fourth level of expertise, the “experienced nurse” ( proficiency ) is characterized by good to very good performance. Flexible and quick action oriented towards longer-term goals are decisive for problem access and working style. People at this level can perceive situations as a whole with certain shades and understand them on the basis of previous experiences. An unconscious experience of similarities to previous experiences, including developments over time, has an orienting effect. Using the example of nursing, experienced nurses can estimate with relative certainty when the time has come for babies or patients in general to be able to switch from artificial ventilation to natural breathing. This level can, but does not have to, be reached after three to five years in the same field of work. It is reported as noteworthy that experienced nurses (and also experts) cannot necessarily verbalize reasons for their actions and that, when asked about them, they sometimes invent justifications for intuitively correct action. For further development, it can be beneficial to work on case studies and your own wealth of experience in communicative processes.

Fifth stage

The fifth and last level of the model is called “Nursing Expert” ( expertise ), whereby very good performance is regularly achieved. Experts are not dependent on rules, guidelines and general principles in their field of work. You can also intuitively grasp special or rare situations and quickly identify the core of the problem. You manage to deal with new things in a relatively routine manner. Expert nurses can include: B. Recognize medical emergencies immediately and then take action and inform others. It can, for. It can happen, for example, that the nursing staff give instructions to less experienced or less informed doctors who are higher in the hierarchy because the emergency demands it in their assessment of the situation. Expertise can be developed in the same field of work after around eight to ten years. In order to achieve a positive development even at the highest level, an exchange with other experts is necessary. The assumption of tasks in the field of vocational training and in the further development of the profession also appears favorable.

Major change steps

According to Ziemer's compilation, three main movements towards expertise can be identified:

Firstly, a change away from following abstract principles and towards paradigmatic recourse to concrete experiences.
Second, a change in the perception of situational requirements: situations appear less as a sum of equal details and more as a complete whole in which only certain parts are important.
And thirdly, a change from an uninvolved observer to a committed actor: The people concerned no longer observe situations from the outside, but stand in the situation, ie they are and feel themselves directly involved.

criticism

Among other things, Neuweg criticizes the fact that it is not clarified why "experts" at Dreyfus and Dreyfus do not become "implicitly blind", i.e. lose the ability to reflect on whether their actions conform to rule-based knowledge (e.g. new scientific findings). This raises the question of whether "expert status" is even worth striving for. Fichtmüller and Walter transfer this criticism to Benner's step model. Krell asked nurses with different levels of professional experience about the frequency with which they raised questions in their everyday work. The frequency of open questions was then compared between the nurses of different levels of experience according to the Benner division. Contrary to what was assumed, there were no significant differences in frequency; Benner's picture that increasing experience in a practical context almost automatically leads to nurses acting more and more intuitively and ultimately having hardly any (conscious) questions about their work, could not be empirically confirmed . One explanation for this is the different difficulty of tasks. It could be that nurses with increasing professional experience also receive increasingly complex tasks because they enjoy greater trust in the team. Krell therefore suggests expanding Benner's model to include the aspect of the complexity of tasks and their impact on the development of competence. If one were to assume that only coping with tasks with increasing complexity leads to the acquisition of action competence, one could explain on the one hand why some people do not become more competent in their field even with increasing experience (e.g. if they do not have new / more complex tasks get) and one could explain the cited empirical finding in such a way that the professionally experienced people in the sample often had open questions because they were given tasks that they continued to rate as complex. For example, because colleagues have great confidence in experienced professionals and they turn to them when they don't know what to do next.

literature

Patricia Benner : Levels of nursing competence = From novice to expert. Translated from English by Matthias Wengenroth. Hans Huber-Verlag, Bern 1994, ISBN 3-456-82305-3
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus: Artificial Intelligence , Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-499-18144-4
Andrew Hunt: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Refactor your wetware! From the American. by Dirk Wittke. Hanser, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-446-41643-7 .
Franz E. Weinert: Comparative performance measurement in schools - a controversial matter of course. In: Franz E. Weinert (Ed.): Performance measurements in schools [created on behalf of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education of the Federal Republic of Germany], Weinheim 2001, ISBN 3-407-25243-9 , pp. 17–32
Thomas Ziemer: The half-year internship from the perspective of students on the way to becoming a teacher: an empirical study of learning in the practical field. Diss. Bremen 2008, URN-Link (permanently available-citable): Electronic Resource, 2009

Individual evidence

^ FE Weinert, 2001
^ HL Dreyfus and SE Dreyfus, 1987
↑ P. Benner, 1994
↑ T. Ziemer, 2009
^ Neuweg, Georg Hans: Skill and tacit knowledge. On the importance of Michael Polany's epistemology in terms of teaching and learning . Waxmann, Münster 1999.
↑ Fichtmüller, Frank and Walter, Anja: learn grooming. Empirical development of concepts and theories on the effective structure of learning and teaching in professional nursing. V & R Unipress, Göttingen 2007.
↑ Krell, Johannes: How meaningful is Benner's step model for competence development? An empirical study. In: Education of the Health Professions. hpsmedia, 2019, accessed on September 9, 2019 .

[1] FE Weinert, 2001

[2] HL Dreyfus and SE Dreyfus, 1987

[3] P. Benner, 1994

[4] T. Ziemer, 2009

[5] Neuweg, Georg Hans: Skill and tacit knowledge. On the importance of Michael Polany's epistemology in terms of teaching and learning . Waxmann, Münster 1999.

[6] Fichtmüller, Frank and Walter, Anja: learn grooming. Empirical development of concepts and theories on the effective structure of learning and teaching in professional nursing. V & R Unipress, Göttingen 2007.

[7] Krell, Johannes: How meaningful is Benner's step model for competence development? An empirical study. In: Education of the Health Professions. hpsmedia, 2019, accessed on September 9, 2019 .