Principle 7: Skill building is messy and never occurs in a straight line.
Skill building is a continuous cycle of construction, collapse, and reconstruction.
Note: Unconstrained Kids unpacks, translates, and integrates academic research and data about skill type and the principles of skill building to support the improvement of PK-12 reading, writing, and mathematics. This post is part of a series that describes 7 key principles of skill building I identified from Dynamic Skill Theory and the Science of Learning and Development. Like everything on this Substack, this post is a work-in-progress. I will make updates as needed. Citations are included at the end. Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome.
First posted: June 4, 2025
Last updated: July 24, 2026
Key Takeaway
Skill is the capacity to think and act in an organized way in a specific context (Immordino-Yang and Fischer, 2010). Building new skills is a journey. The terrain is full of growth spurts, drops, and plateaus. While new learners have the most ups and downs, even experts will experience the occasional drops in skill levels as they acquire new knowledge and skills. Skill building is a cycle of building, collapse, and rebuilding. Skills develop on two simultaneous tracks: short-term changes that can appear more chaotic and long-term changes that appear as sudden jumps in ability. There is no single way to build skills.
Skill building is messy. It doesn’t follow a single, tidy pathway. Instead, skill development moves in a continuous cycle of construction, collapse, and reconstruction. As we saw in Principle 1, skills are organized in a hierarchy from simpler lower-level skills to more complex higher-level skills. When we develop new skills we rebuild the very structure of skills.
“People build a skill and then repeatedly rebuild it in a wavelike pattern of construction and reconstruction, not in a straight line or monotonic upward progression. Encountering a new task or situation, people first move down to a low level of complexity…They then gradually build a more complex skill for coping with the task by repeatedly rebuilding it with variations” (Fischer & Bidell, 2006).
Since skills are so tightly welded to context, even a minor disturbance—a dip in motivation, a spike in frustration, or a change in scenery—can cause a newly formed skill to temporarily collapse. For beginners, this process looks incredibly chaotic. But even seasoned experts experience drops when they learn something new. The difference is that these drops tend to be smaller and short-lived (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer, 2008). Regardless of age, domain, or expertise, everyone experiences this pattern of construction and reconstruction when learning new skills.
Growth curves for learning a new task. Source: Fischer (2008).
Short-and long-term skill building
Watching children and youth develop skills can sometimes look like climbing a ladder. At other times it can look like a wild roller coaster ride. This conflicting picture appears because we build skills simultaneously on two parallel tracks:
Moment-to-Moment Construction: This is the rapid, real-time process of skill building that occurs in increments as small as minutes or hours when a child actively tackles a specific problem. Small scale changes stem from developing skills for specific contexts, tasks, or problems (Fischer and Granott, 1995; Fischer and Bidell, 2006). On this track, skill is highly unstable. We can see the looped roller coaster ride of quick jumps in ability followed by sudden drops of competence.
Long-Term Growth: This is the large-scale change in ability that unfolds gradually over months and years, shaping a child’s overall capability as they grow up. This long-term progress quietly gathers all those tiny, moment-to-moment changes and weaves them together. Skill building often shows up as sudden, massive leaps up a ladder in broad skill mastery across multiple environments (Fischer and Yan 2002; Fischer and Bidell, 2006).
Long-term skill mastery isn’t a separate process from short-term changes—it is the sum total of those smaller moments built up over time (Granott, 2002). At the same time, a child’s overall skill bandwidth (as described in Principle 6) sets the boundaries for how they perform in specific real-world contexts. Every time a child struggles in real-time, steps backward, and tries a new strategy, they are laying the foundation for a larger, more complex skill down the road.
No single approach for skill building
There is no single “right” approach for skill building, no standardized method for twisting individual threads into thick, versatile skill ropes. Multiple paths lie open to every child (Cantor et al., 2019; Immordino-Yang and Fischer, 2010). While there may be popular ways of teaching, the science of learning and development proves that children can arrive at the exact same destination of mastery using entirely different pathways.1
Children and youth benefit from a variety of opportunities to build skills in formal and informal learning settings, across the classroom, community, and home. Without these varied opportunities, children easily fall behind what they are truly capable of achieving, and their progress stalls. This is particularly important for unconstrained skills, which develop from direct and indirect instruction and experiences inside and outside of the classroom.
But wait, there’s more
Works Cited
Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2019). Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context. Applied Developmental Science, 23(4), 307-337.
Fischer, K. W. (2008). Dynamic cycles of cognitive and brain development: Measuring growth in mind, brain, and education. In A. M. Battro, K. W. Fischer, & P. Léna (Eds.), The educated brain (pp. 127–150). Cambridge University Press.
Fischer, K. W., & Bidell, T. R. (2006). Dynamic development of action and thought. In R. M. Lerner & W. Damon (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Theoretical models of human development (6th ed., pp. 313–399). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Fischer, K. W., & Granott, N. (1995). Beyond one-dimensional change: Parallel, concurrent, socially distributed processes in learning and development. Human Development, 38(6), 302-314.
Fischer, K. W., & Yan, Z. (2002). Darwin's construction of the theory of evolution: Microdevelopment of explanations of variation and change in species. In N. Granott & J. Parziale (Eds.), Microdevelopment: Transition processes in development and learning. Cambridge University Press.
Granott, N. (2002). How microdevelopment creates macrodevelopment: Reiterated sequences, backward transitions, and the Zone of Current Development. In N. Granott & J. Parziale (Eds.), Microdevelopment: Transition processes in development and learning. Cambridge University Press.
Immordino-Yang, M. H., & Fischer, K. W. (2010). Neuroscience bases of learning. In V. G. Aukrust (Ed.), International encyclopedia of education (3rd Edition, pp. 310–316). Elsevier.
Social scientists have a name for this concept: equifinality. There is support for this from multiple quarters. Catharine Knight and Kurt Fischer found three developmental pathways for developing word-reading skills (Knight and Fischer, 1992; Fischer et al., 2007). Catherine Snow notes that some children are successful in math or reading by using “tricks, reminders, and strategies” that differ from what is formally taught in the classroom (Snow, 2008). While the standard procedures might be tremendously helpful for some children, for others they could be a hindrance. Ann Dowker reports that “derived strategies” in mathematics, which depart from “traditional” skill pathways embodied in memorization of algorithms, are not only effective but appear to be associated with greater conceptual understanding of math principles (Dowker, 2019). Cognitive scientist and psycholinguist Mark Seidenberg argues that while lots of explicit teaching of phonics (a constrained skill) can be tremendously helpful for dyslexic kids, we don’t need to apply this approach to all children. This is because typically developing children “can pick up some of the nuances of language through what’s called statistical learning—the ability to generalize rules from lots of exposure to text” (Schwartz, 2026).