How to be an expert in practically anything using heuristics, Bloom's taxonomy, Dreyfus model, and building rubrics for mastery: case of epidemiology and mountain bike riding
Authors: Basu Arindam 
Published: October 2020

In this review of how novices can develop mastery, I will summarise the key research from educational studies to the pathway of mastery. According to the five stage theory of development of mastery by Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus, everyone begin as novices. Novices in their journey to develop expertise require heuristics and rules that are context free to develop skills. With more experience and with deliberate practice with graduated challenges and feedbacks to correct errors, the novice then reaches a stage where the novice then contextualises the heuristics and rules. This is the stage where the novice then starts developing “tacit” knowledge that will enable the novice to start contextualising the problems that the novice can start to solve. In the third stage of developing mastery, the novice becomes a competent practitioner where the novice starts building an emotional attachments as they gain more experiences with a range of situations and therefore develop repertoire of skills and positions. However, at this stage, since the competent practitioner has now developed a vast range of skills and knowledge about problem solving, understanding which technique or which strategy to adopt in what situations become challenging. This stage is emotionally exhausting for the competent practitioner but the competent practitioner is now emotionally connected to the knowledge process or solving problems. Thus, if a problem is solved, the competent practitoner is elated and if the problem is not solved or the competent practitioner fails, they are emotionally upset. With more practice and development and gain of skills, experiences, the competent practitioner enters the stage of expertise. In this stage, they still analyse and use heuristics and calculations to solve problems, with even stronger emotional attachment. Finally, in stage five, when the expert becomes a master, a sense of fluidity develops, where the master is aware of, but does not need to explicitly calculate or use heuristics to solve problems, instead a sense of creativity and flow develops in the master.
Patricia Benner corroborated these concepts in the context of nursing and medical students and training of doctors. Here, the nurses and health providers undergo these five stages as they continue to develop mastery. Students start as novice nurses where they use rote learning and heuristics to solve problems. Then, as they gain more experiences in real wards and patient care, they learn how to contextualise the learned concepts in real world patient care. Over time, they develop rich repertoire of experiences and become competent practitioners to solve most day to day problems. Finally in the stage of mastery and expertise, they do not need to use the heuristics and rules anymore.
These five-stage development of mastery can be mapped on to the concepts of cognitive development of mastery in learning that Benjamin Bloom proposed in 1956 working with school students and then he further developed as taxonomy of learning using a six-stage model. This is referred to as Bloom’s taxonomy of learning mastery where the most basic stage is “remember” where the learning objective is recalling information. This is really a low level but basic activity where the students gain knowledge by rote learning but not necessarily be able to contextualise it to their learned circumstances. In the second stage of development of mastery, once the students have demonstrated the mastery of rote learning, they show that they “understand” the core concepts. In the third stage, they are able to apply the learned concepts to new and unseen or situations that they had not previously experienced. In the fourth stage, they are able to analyse novel situations and can solve problems. In the final stage, they can create new knowledge. These stages of learning mastery that Bloom proposed map on to the five-stage model of mastery development that Dreyfus proposed and Benner validated.
The question then, is, what is the mechanism by which this mastery is gained? What can a teacher do to develop expertise and mastery in a student? Bloom’s concept was that it should be based on initially providing lessons, then testing whether the student has learned the concepts, and if there are broken mental models that need to be addressed by correcting errors and providing new challenges. Each time the teacher presents a new, and slightly more difficult challenge to the student; the student attempts to solve it and gains valuable experience doing so. As each stage is reached, the teacher then progresses the student to the next stage of performance. In this way, the teacher traverses the five stage of mastery by creating a mastery rubric.
We put these concepts in the context of how we can teach public health and evidence appraisal or critical thinking for students using this mastery rubric and graduated challenges. At the lowest stage, students are provided with lessons that involve rote learning and recall based assignments and formative assignments. In subsequent stages, we provide the students with more graduated challenges that they attempt to solve as they move up the ladder of expertise. Finally, the students are asked to develop a research proposal or comprehensively critique a body of knowledge.