Principle 14: Skill building involves small-scale changes in specific contexts and large-scale changes across multiple contexts.
Skills are simultaneously built in the short-term (seconds, minutes, hours, days) and long-term (months, years).
Note: Unconstrained Kids unpacks, translates, and integrates academic research and data about constrained and unconstrained skills for people that run, fund, and assist organizations that teach and serve kids. This post is part of a series that describes 14 key principles of skill building I identified from the Science of Learning and Development. (Especially Dynamic Skill Theory.) 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.
Last updated: June 4, 2025
Key Takeaway
Skill is the ability to think and act in an organized way in a specific context (Immordino-Yang and Fischer, 2010). The process of skill-building occurs at two levels: short-term, small-scale changes in specific contexts and longer-term, large-scale changes across multiple contexts. Skill building depends upon a variety of experiences and opportunities for developing, overlearning, and generalizing skills across contexts and emotional and mental states. This can be supported with the intentional design and development of learning opportunities and experiences intended to optimize skill development with high, personalized support (Cantor et al., 2019).
“Learning is a class of short-term changes leading to new knowledge and skill. Development is a class of long-term changes leading to new knowledge and skill. Learning and development occur at the same time.” (Fischer & Granott, 1995)
Skill building happens at two levels: a) shorter-term, small-scale changes within particular domains or contexts and b) longer-term, large-scale changes independent of domain (Fischer & Bidell, 2006). Psychologists refer to these small-scale changes as microdevelopment. The large-scale changes are referred to as macrodevelopment.
There are multiple pathways for skill building. (See Principle 12.) Developmental psychologists describe this as a “constructive web.” Shorter-term changes in skill building create the individual strands; longer-term changes comprise the entire web (Fischer & Bidell, 2006).
These shorter-term small scale changes (microdevelopment) involve the acquisition of skills for specific contexts, tasks, or problems. Skill acquisition can occur within relatively limited amounts of time – as short as minutes, hours, days, or weeks (Fischer & Granott, 1995; Fischer & Bidell, 2006).
Microdevelopment is involved when children are expected to learn, grow, and master skills in “school time” – minutes, hours, days, weeks, semesters (Fischer, 2008). This includes combining, differentiating, and reorganizing specific skills in particular tasks and contexts, as well as generalizing them (Fischer & Yan, 2002).
By contrast, macrodevelopment involves broader-scale change over months and years. This larger scale process incorporates the many varied activities and domains involved in microdevelopment. These skills are gradually consolidated, generalized, and related across contexts over long periods.
Developmentally, these changes appear as periodic clusters of jumps, drops, and reorganizations of skills across multiple strands (domains). (Fischer & Bidell, 2006). In this process of reorganization and rebuilding of skill hierarchies, macrodevelopment adds broad changes in mental capacity and frameworks (Fischer & Yan, 2002).
These shorter-term, small-scale changes in skill level and longer-term, large-scale changes in skill ability converge and integrate. Both levels of skill building affect and place limits on the other. Longer-term, large-scale development is limited (constrained) by the amount and degree of skill development from shorter-term, small-scale skill building.
In turn, broader scale, cross-domain skills (macrodevelopment) create limits on the developmental range of short-term, small scale skill development. The developmental range is the difference in a person’s ability when they work independently (the functional level) and with high support (the optimal level) (Fischer & Bidell, 2006).
Skills are gradually constructed and reconstructed in both the short-term (in seconds, minutes, hours, or days) and long-term (in months or years) (Fischer & Yan, 2002). Both levels of skill building work together to “form complex skills that stabilize and generalize to new contexts over time” (Cantor et al., 2019).
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., & 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. (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., & 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.
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.