Skill theory (Summary)

 A Skill is the base of this unit. Skill development is analyzed in terms of a set of skill structures together with a set of transformation rules and they are related to each other. Skills change trough a series of cognitive levels with particular steps.

A skill is an organized ability, it’s composed of one o more components, and these components can be sensorimotor actions, representations, or abstractions. In using a skill, a person controls sources of variation. These sources are determined jointly by the person’s actions and the environment. Because of this reason, skills must be relatively specific. Environment dictates that children master particular skills. This theory of skill is different from a Piagetian scheme which assumed to have a high degree of generality resulting from a structure d’ ensemble. It characterizes a person as being at a particular developmental stage, and a skill as at a particular level.
Changes in the environmental context of skills produce changes in the skills, and therefore skills in different domains seldom show precise synchrony in developmental level.

Different people show behaviors that look the same but involve different skills. Behavior is ambiguous. The “same” act can be carried out via a number of different strategies and therefore via different skills. These different skills involve different developmental levels.

A straightforward rule proves to be useful in moving beyond the ambiguity of behavior, find the simplest possible skill that could produce a particular behavior, where the investigator designs the simplest task for testing each step in a predicted developmental sequence. This assumption will allow us to predict earliest possible level at which that behavior can appear.

Different skill will be at different levels in the same child at the same time. Even if analysis is limited to one area, such as language, children will not show the same level of performance across skills. Skill theory explains these shifts trough the construct of optimal level.

The child has an upper limit to her abilities – a highest level beyond which she cannot go. Consequently the skills that she practices frequently will be at this highest level, but other skills will not. Optimal level increases with age, and the population of language. The increase in optimal level does not seem to be constant, however: it seems to show cyclical periods of relatively faster change and slower change and so in sense. These changes in speed mean that children at a given level should be able to master more complex steps within level but should have difficulty even the simplest step at the next level.

Optimal level thus accounts for the broad course of development in al skills, including language skills. There are ten levels which a person develops from infancy to adulthood. They increase in difficult and complexity. The existence of these levels has been supported by other investigators for the period of infancy.

The progression of skills show a repetitive cycle suck that the structures of levels. Each of the cycles, called a tier. Specifies skills of different types. But the four levels have similar structures. Levels 1, 4, and 7 involve single units. At levels 2, 5, and 8, the characteristic structure is a mapping, in which variations in one component are systematically related to variation in a second.

In this system, the ability to relate several distinct aspects of each component allows the child to understand complex relations between the components. Levels 4. 7. And 10 are the culmination of development within each tier.
However major statistical shifts in population of skills do occur, both within and across children.

Skill theory explains these shifts through the construct of optimal level.

Optimal level increase with age, of course, and the population of language skills gradually shifts upward in a statistical fashion as the child develops a higher optimal level.

The ten developmental levels described by skill theory.

Sensorimotor

-Single sensorimotor action.
-Sensorimotor mapping
-Sensorimotor system

Representational

- System of sensorimotor systems
- Representational mapping
- Representational system
- System of representational systems

Abstract
- Abstract mapping
- Abstract system
-System of abstract system.