Learning about the Four Stages of Competence

I learned a new model of competence in a meeting with the High Impact Practices Assessment Task Force two weeks ago. I'm glad I jotted it in my notebook, since this brought it back to mind with an intention for a quick blog post.

My colleague Michael O'Hara mentioned a taxonomy of competence that goes, from lowest to highest:

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

He told me that this is widely used in his discipline of Theater Education, but I had never seen it before. A bit of searching led me to the Wikipedia entry, which refers to this as the Four Stages of Competence or the Conscious Competence learning model. Michael pointed out an interesting property of this progression: that, except for the lowest level, a learner can usually self-assess accurately.

When he brought this up at the meeting, my mind immediately went to the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition, which is my go-to model for thinking about how learners' skills develop. The conscious incompetence level of the Four Stages of Competence model reminds me of the Competent level of Dreyfus Model: it's the level above second-order ignorance, at which a learner develops the ability to recognize their own errors and self-correct.

It's not immediately clear to me if I have a place to slot in the Four Stages into my current teaching and research. More specifically, it's not yet clear to me that its two-dimensional space captures the what I try to assess in my students, or rather, that it the taxonomy leads me to more effective teaching or assessment. However, it has a nice ring to it, a kind of elegance that's easy to show and explain. I suspect this is where it will be most useful: to help novice learners become more metacognitive, which may in turn make them more receptive to advice on how to learn more effectively.