The Study and Training of Skills
Skills can only be learned through trial and error.
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Skilled movements are performed by individuals, either independently or as part of group behavior, like the action of teams, man-machine systems, or companies. Such movements can be viewed in the same light as the motion of physical objects like rocks and planets and can be studied effectively (as trajectories) using techniques in computer simulation.
Skills are sensory-motor processes and are always performed in one or another setting, or virtual reality, so they are also personal-environmental interactions. The range of skills is as broad as the span of imagination. Skills are problem-solving tools. We can distinguish between sensing skills and motor skills. Each displays various levels of competence and is subject to training. Skills are also management tools.
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Inherently, skills are extremely complex, involving sensory and motor processes in a highly interactive way. Even "simple" actions, like clicking a key on a computer keyboard, involve an enormous number of cerebral connections. We learn some things easily, instinctively -- in these instances it seems that most neuronal connections are already in place and ready to respond, perhaps as part of our genetic inheritance. (In neural network terms, this involves modifying the weights of the neuronal connections in a network. This is like coating neurons with myelin, or like blazing trails through the wilds.)
We tend to grade skills on a scale from simple to complex -- i.e., from automatic and highly repetitive to mostly conscious and non-repetitive at the other. But what is "simple" or "complex" may depend more on the performer than the skill itself.
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Another distinction among skills is that between acquiring and using information -- between learning about something and doing something with the knowledge. Van Merrienboer refers to the former as declarative skills, whereas the latter are called procedural skills. I believe the former are investigative skills.
I distinguish between patterned recognition and patterned action. So I use terms like pattern recognition skills, perception skills, measurement skills, or reading skills to identify the sensory processing skills. And I use either motor skills or performance skills to refer to procedural skills. The former are intended to find out what (spatial or temporal) conditions exist in the operational situation, and the latter to produce desired conditions in that situation.
Perception skills help you see what's going on (investigation), and motor skills let you deal with the situation you perceive. So you may learn to perceive characteristics of, or recognize patterns of, objects or events, or you may learn to execute or perform an operation, according to some pattern (both partly conscious processes).
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Sensing skills have a strong motor component. For example, when you read a book (visually, say) you must use the muscles of your eyes. You have to focus your eyes on the words. And you have to scan the page to follow the lines of print. (A blind person reading braille would rely on the tactile sense.) Similarly, when tracking a moving ball, you have to contract and relax muscles to keep the ball in view. As a biologist studying living cells, you might use muscle power to adjust the focus of a microscope. In a similar way, a physicist probing the nature of matter might have to work with a proton accelerator.
All intelligence gathering is intrinsically dynamic. But the activity is subservient to the goal; it occurs to get information in support of the goal -- information about what is going on in the world. Information itself is patterned. You pattern as you read (or read as you pattern). Patterning takes time to evolve and requires learning -- such as learning to read German or French, or learning to discriminate between different football trajectories.
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No action can be performed without directly engaging your senses. While you may not need specific external or exteroceptive sensors (your eyes, ears, tactile sense, etc.), it's not possible to move a muscle without engaging the proprioceptive sensors (the sensors in our muscles, tendons, and joints). This is because information acquired from the brain through these detectors establishes the requirements for the motion and provides the feedback to control them. (For more details, see my thesis.)
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Managing Your Skills
The expression 'managing your skills' is redundant, because skills are personally supervised and controlled behaviors. The ability to produce a purposeful result makes the action a skill. To say you are skilled is to say you can manage by yourself -- i.e., you are competent, you can tie your own shoelaces; you can solve problems. Inasmuch as skilled behavior involves observation as well as movement, this means you can watch what is happening in the course of the skill and execute the motor component efficiently without having to rely on others. This is empowerment.
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Learning skills is a complex process, because it requires learning -- or re-learning -- perceptual and motor components of the skills. Unfortunately, when we train skills we tend to ignore perception and focus on the motor component. Whether you are concerned with teaching new skills or modifying old ones -- either personal or organizational skills -- the tight interaction between observing and doing has also to be addressed, but usually isn't.
In particular, you have to consider that changes in the motor component of a skill generally call for new awarenesses. You can't expect new motor subtleties to evolve if trainees can't make the appropriate sensory distinctions to perform them. Recognition of the required sensory patterns on the part of the trainee is too often assumed to be obvious or is neglected by the trainer, when it is more likely not obvious.
Challenging Variety of Skills
A procedure that combines tutorials and practice uses simulation to represent the skills arena and offers practice materials along with verbal instruction. Simulation provides the proper environment -- the real world -- for performing the required skills but eliminates hazards, and thus tends to promote learning. The ideal in simulation is to exactly replicate the real world in which the skills are to occur, since the skill transfer from simulation to the real world would then be optimized. Unfortunately, though, developing the simulation is a difficult and expensive proposition.
An important point to note is that simulation, while difficult to develop properly, offers the possibility of feedback that the real world often can't provide. In simulation you can pause to see what happened, whereas the real world won't wait -- it keeps rolling along even though you'd like to stop to take a look.
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