Mastery Learning

“five-stage model of adult skill acquisition.” From a humble “novice,” skill learners progressed to the “advanced beginner” stage, then on to a sort of midpoint of “competence,” before climbing further to “proficiency,” finally summiting at “expertise.”

As mastery becomes a process of unlearning over accumulation, experimentation becomes synonymous with learning as you force yourself to go outside your comfort zone and try new things.

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.

Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.