Skill... what is that anyway?

I first wrote this post for my paleoblog Weird & Wonderful, but the more I wrote on it, the better it seemed to fit nicely here as well. I find the points made about education very important, especially if we want to make a better world for the next generation! 

One of the things I noticed during my first year in the UK is that there is an almost ludicrous emphasis on skills. At least among the academics, much of what you hear is all about having skills, skills, skills and skills…

I must admit that I find this both amusing and a tad annoying. There is more to life than being skilled, in my opinion. Not saying that a solid set of skills is not useful or desirable, but this nagging about skills is extremely off-putting for me.

But, rather than judging too hastily, I thought maybe the problem is just that I do not know what they actually mean by ‘skills’. I had a good idea of what the word means and implies, but was not sure if I actually understood every aspect of the term.

So, one night I finally got down to looking it up (haha), and, when I got absorbed into the various divisions or types of skills, before I knew it, I found myself doing surprisingly keen research and even taking notes! Naturally, this had to be made into a post on this blog. It does not have much to do with paleontology, but rather with professional life in general.

Before we begin, I just want to mention that this clearly shows what type of academic I am. I found learning about skills interesting because of the many theoretical groupings of types of skills and the implications their respective demands and values have on education theory. Nothing of this has made me more eager to gain any ‘skills’; that does not appeal to me in the same way. I am a theoretical person, not practical.

What on Earth is a skill, then? What is it really?

A dictionary definition of ‘skill’ is “the ability to do something well; expertise” or “a particular ability”. The same dictionary defines ‘ability’ as “possession of the means or skill to do something”. So ‘skill’ becomes the possession of the means or skill to do something well… Great.  

‘Expertise’ is moreover defined as “expert skill or knowledge in a particular field”, from which I gather that any expertise is a form of skill, but any skill is not necessarily an expertise.

Regardless, this seems to lead nowhere, except that ‘skill’ seems to be a very broad term, suggested by the repeated mention of “something”.

Luckily, Wikipedia rarely disappoints: “A skill is the learned ability to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both.” This immediately becomes much more interesting.

Although may not be overly keen on agreeing with the need for a skill to be learned, at least most skills would be. This implies that the skills must be acquired throughout one’s life. This effectively excludes innate talent, if you agree. This might make statements such as ‘Mozart was a skilled composer’ a bit tricky to justify. I believe few would disagree with the claim that Mozart had a natural talent of knowing what sounds good in music, so that may not be a ‘skill’. However, he was not born with practical knowledge of the standard procedures of how to structure a composition, in particular the language used to communicate it. That was a skill he obtained through dedicated learning and practice. So, he was skilled, but was he skilled in any way different from any other composer, who also must have learned the same skills? Are all composers not skilled? Skilled to a different degree, perhaps? Maybe we should adjust the statement to ‘Mozart was a talented and (highly?) skilled composer’.

Wikipedia’s definition also fleshes out the “something” from the dictionary version: the aim of the skill is to reach a pre-determined outcome. The skill works toward a goal, a goal that is defined in advance. It is not just doing anything, but carrying out focused tasks. I furthermore interpret this as implying that the type of skill may be determined by its purpose; different skills have different respective aims.

Examples of such pre-determined outcomes could be: accurately measuring the weight of an object, scoring above 100 000 in Angry Birds, convincing a friend to try a new dish, writing a good essay under 750 words, crossing the street without being injured, reading any novel by Garcia Marquez without crying (of boredom), etc.

This also means that trivial things such as picking your nose, walking to the toilet, signing a piece of paper, and asking for directions; these are all skills as well.

It seems this definition still is rather vague. It narrowed the ‘something’ down to ‘a purpose’, but it cannot exclude the trivial examples from above. We need something more, something to distinguish what most mean by ‘skill’ and any ability to perform any set task. Even the addition of the usual ideal to carry out the task with minimum time and effort fails to make the separation. How can we define ‘skill’ so that picking your nose is not included? (Note that I am making the implicit claim that picking your nose isn’t a skill, but that may very well be discussed… and disgusting…)

I have no answer to this question at the moment, but if we carry on maybe something will crop up eventually. Let us now look at the various groups of skills. It is human nature to organise the world into categories; by generalising about these categories, we can handle the vast complexity of the world in a simplified manner. That is why I find such groupings interesting and important to be familiar with.

Skills can be broadly separated into domain-general and domain-specific skills. Domain-general skills are useful in a broader situations or contexts, or useful across various different situations, while domain-specific skills are applicable only to a very specific situation. Literacy would be a domain-general skill, while the ability to identify a Gryphaea species (a type of extinct mussle, see Fossils) is a domain-specific skill, as you focus on the features that are unique to that species – being able to recognise those features will not help you identify any other species, as they will not possess them. Naturally, there are many grey areas. Many might say that speaking the lingua franca English is a domain-general skill, but what about speaking Swedish, which is only spoken in one country (and a few communities around in Scandinavia)?

This classification only separates skills into two categories, but there are more, independent ways of grouping skills (just like you can group people into left-handed and right-handed, with those who have lost their main hand in the grey area, but there are many other ways of grouping people, e.g. nationality, political leaning, eye colour, etc.).

Another contrasting pair of skill groups are basic skills versus higher-order thinking skills. Basic skills are learned by direct instruction, independently from other skills, and without larger (philosophical?) contexts. They are facts and methods learned one at a time, one after the other. All you need to learn these is someone to tell you how to do it; it requires no input from you other than being receptive and able to replicate. Examples include literacy, speech, counting, and basic algebra methods. They seem to make up the fundament of one’s knowledge and abilities, and the rest is probably built on this base.

Higher-order thinking skills, in contrast, include judgmental skills such as analysis and critical thinking, and creative skills such as problem solving and… well, being creative. These are much “more difficult to learn or to teach but also more valuable because such skills are more likely to be useable in novel situations” (Wikipedia). Novel situations refers to situations other than those in which the skill was learned. In other words, higher-order thinking skills are skills that are applicable to more than one situation. This may be related to the domain-general skillset, but these are separate groupings, although they may show a lot of overlap.

It has long been assumed that higher-order thinking skills cannot be learned without first gaining the necessary basic skills, but modern cognitive research seems to have challenged this notion. However, I doubt you could learn thinking skills effectively without first knowing a language (it may be possible, which is a truly fascinating idea to consider hypothetically: how would you think if you did not know any language – not even your own made-up one? what would your thoughts be like? images? or something else?).

I think the point they are making here is that you only need the most basic of the basic skills in order to gain higher-order thinking skills. You do not need to read the musings of Aristotle to reach similar conclusions; if you are faced with the same problems, you might solve it the same way as he did. Thus, higher-order thinking skills may be taught by presenting only the problem, and letting the students find the solution themselves.

This is of course much more challenging to teach and learn successfully; it requires a considerably greater input from the teacher as well as the student. However, since it has been shown that higher-order thinking skills can be learned without extensive knowledge other than the essentials such as language and basic logic, it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable, to begin teaching them already at elementary school.

I cannot emphasise enough how strongly I feel that these thinking skills are invaluably important. I am not only talking about academics here; anyone’s life may be improved by applying effective thinking to one’s situation. We are faced with problems that need to be overcome on a daily basis; the more efficiently we can solve them, the better.

Therefore, I am distraught that there was little or no attention toward such skills during my year at the University of Bristol. This makes their endless nagging about skills even more upsetting. This first year was intended to provide us undergraduates with a solid knowledge base before progressing into the second year, so it seems they prioritised plain knowledge over thinking skills. They consider that more important at this point. Fair enough, I can accept that. But it made me rather disillusioned with the quality of the teaching. There was so little effort to stimulate us to think on our own. They never got tired of telling us to read and learn more about what they mentioned in the lectures, but there were no instances that I can remember where they asked us to evaluate a theory or method or anything of the like.

Ironically, it seems they applied the approach I mentioned for teaching higher-order thinking skills to teach us the basic skills. They would give us five samples of rocks that many of us had never seen before in our lives, and tasked us to describe and identify them. They were kind enough to give us a handout with descriptions, but rock identification is too subjective to be explained by some vague words on a sheet of paper. It ended in a complete disaster and the teachers were disappointed with our results. They told us to make more effort the next time.

I feel it is a shame that there was no emphasis on thinking skills. What I find even more lamentable is that there seems to have been no attention toward them in England at pre-university level either. From what I have heard and seen from my peers, it seems their abilities to evaluate and think critically are poorly developed. A good friend even seems offended when I question big science theories. She argues that they were made by scientists who are much more intelligent than I am. Of that I have not doubt, but she clearly missed the point of critical thinking: it has nothing to do with intelligence, but with challenging the fundamental reasoning and assumptions of an idea; it requires logics, not intellect. If the students do not even fully comprehend what critical thinking means, they will find it difficult to start doing it when push comes to shove.

I am not trying to say my higher-order thinking skills are superb. I have much to learn, and I know this because I understand what these skills encompass and what they will require of me. But, at the same time, I also deem them indispensable to my life, and want to develop them at every opportunity. And I wish for more opportunities!

Wondering about the pre-university education of my peers in the UK, I remember how I struggled in Sweden from year seven through nine in the natural and social science classes.  Even though I remembered everything the teachers said in class, I never got more than Godkänt (a pass) because I could not think independently. Since the first test, they told me I need to learn to analyse the information in class in order to score a higher grade. Although I had consistent top grades in most other subjects, and though I put considerably greater effort into the natural and social sciences, I was stuck on Godkänt for about two and a half years, because I could not for my life figure out what I needed to do. No one explained how to analyse; they just made it clear that I had to do it.

Miraculously, it all changed in the last term of year nine. I still don’t know what ‘clicked right’ in my head, but something did, and finally I was able to analyse. Still, I did not know what I was doing right; it seemed I just scored higher grades. Even today, those years confuse me, but I remember having struggled hard, facing the fear of not knowing what to do, of working blindfolded, and somehow eventually prevailed.

If I had not learned to think independently, whichever way it happened, I would have struggled even harder in high school. International Baccalaureate has little emphasis on independent thinking in the individual subjects (except perhaps the literature courses, and surely in philosophy), but their so-called ‘core subjects’, which all students must study, irrespective of what other subjects they choose, place considerably more focus and demands on independent thinking and intellectual development. It is from these core subjects that I feel I have learned the most valuable thinking skills.

This makes me eternally grateful for the pressure my teachers in year seven though nine put on me, and, in retrospect, I honestly wish it had started earlier. Still, better late than never. And that is why I am concerned for my fellow students at university. I hope I have just misjudged them and that they have not shown evidence of their thinking skills because the course has not stimulated it!

Realising how long this article has become, and feeling I could go on about this for pages more, maybe it is best to stop here and leave the thread open to be followed up later. Although I do not feel much clearer about what a ‘skill’ really is, at least I have convinced myself even more that it is the higher-order thinking skills that I want to develop. Regretfully, I fear it will not be a welcome sentiment at university, but you now know my feelings on this issue, and have no intention of giving up on them!