What is your child’s level of talent at this point-in-time? Is he making great strides, but the unique talent doesn’t have a standardized test path against which you can measure progress?
One helpful way your child can self-assess and intuitively understand his overall progress is to measure against the Dreyfus Model of Learning. The six grades of a person’s increasing performance level are labeled as:
- Novice (I need to be told when and how on even the very basic steps)
- Advanced Beginner (I can do basic steps of a task, but need help troubleshooting)
- Competent (I can do most troubleshooting on my own)
- Proficient (I’m able to re-arrange task performance routines to achieve goals)
- Expert (I’m helping others by being a primary source of knowledge and work intuitively)
- Master (I’m breaking new ground in my field of interest and others tell me I appear magical in my level of performance)
By the time you can answer “yes” to evaluating yourself as an expert, then you are probably already performing at a world class level and have accumulated those 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. You start the path as a “Novice” and the best time to start as a novice is as a very young person, not as a soon-to-graduate into adulthood person. When that young, your child is still content to learn with very controlled facts and not under pressure to provide for himself or worry about his future.
(post updated from June 2012)