There are 4 stages that everyone will pass through during the learning process. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
- Unconscious incompetence - This basically means that you don't know what you don't know.
- Conscious incompetence - This is where the learner is aware that s/he does not know something or can learn something new. Put more plainly, you realize that you are not as expert as perhaps you thought.
- Conscious competence - This is where you have to think about a task or exercise in order to complete it correctly.
- Unconscious competence - Eventually you reach a point where you no longer have to think about what you are doing in order to complete it correctly. True experts often do things very well without thinking about it.
I think that one of the best
examples of this process is in the case of a person learning to
drive a car. It looks easy when you start but there is a lot to
learn when you actually get behind the wheel of a car. Then years
later you will drive a car without giving it any thought at all.
This leads to problems of people doing make-up, talking on the
phone, etc. while driving when they should be concentrating on the
task at hand. But that is a debate for another lesson.
Here is a picture of the process from
http://www.cognitivedesignsolutions.com/images/CompetencyMatrix.jpg
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