What are skills?

A basic primer.

Mar 07, 2025

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 a basic primer about skills. 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: March 15, 2025

Three Big Ideas

Skill is the capacity to act in an organized way in a specific context. Building highly-developed, automatic skills is essential for goal-oriented behavior (basically, human life).
The interval between a child’s best performances with and without support is their developmental range. When we test children in reading or math we typically assess the lower range of their abilities.
Skills are gradually built and transferred through practice in real activities in specific contexts. This requires regular, predictable environments and prolonged practice over time.

We have a biological need for skill

The primary job of our brain is not thinking – but anticipating and adjusting energy use for our body. This job has a name – allostasis (Barrett, 2020). Although the adult human brain makes up only about 2 percent of our body weight, it uses 20% of our energy. For a newborn it’s at least 65%, which explains why they sleep all the time (Bryson, 2019). Unlike other organs, our brain burns calories at a steady rate no matter what the rest of our body is doing. The brain has major incentives to efficiently use precious resources. This requires the ability to act with limited effort. In other words, we must develop skills.

Skill is essential for goal-oriented behavior

Skill is the capacity to act in an organized way in a specific context (Fischer & Bidell, 2006). The development and refinement of skills to support goal-oriented action is an essential part of human life. Executive skills — attention control, attention shifting, inhibition control — help us manage and regulate our thoughts, emotions, and actions. Working memory is the information we store (visual and verbal) and use to take actions or make decisions. The human brain has limited capacity for actively holding information. A key aspect of skill development is automaticity.

Highly developed skills are automatic actions used to achieve objectives without the conscious awareness of the substeps or control involved (Afflerbach et al., 2008). We use automatic actions all the time – ranging from simple tasks like tying our shoes or chopping a vegetable to more complex activities like playing a musical instrument or driving a car. Development of automaticity in a wide range of activities is necessary to avoid overtaxing the limited capacity of our brains to actively manage multiple things at once.

Developing skills takes intention, purposefulness, and practice. In the initial phases of skill development, this requires active control, focus on achieving a goal, and awareness of our actions. As we develop toward mastery, these abilities become second nature and habitual. They exist just outside of our conscious deliberation. This applies to a wide range of activities, such hitting a tennis ball, playing a musical instrument, or reading a book (Afflerbach et al., 2008).

Knowledge is essential for skill

Knowledge is the ability to use facts, principles, and ideas to decide and do complex tasks (Cantor et al., 2021). Knowledge is an essential part of skill building. Sometimes knowledge itself is referred to as a skill (e.g. background or content knowledge). Indeed, the ability to access and use facts, principles, and ideas to engage in goal-oriented behavior is an important part of skill development.

Content knowledge, background knowledge, text structure knowledge, and morphological knowledge are all referred to as component reading skills. Vocabulary, a critical component skill for both reading and math, is also a type of knowledge. “The knowledge of a word not only implies a definition, but also implies how that word fits into the world.” (Stahl, 2005) Factual (or declarative) knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conceptual knowledge are the three primary components of mathematics.

Context matters for skill

Skills are developed in specific contexts. Take running for example. From a skill perspective, there is no such thing as running. There is running on a treadmill, on a track, cross-country, or running on sand. These are not the same exact activity. Running up a hill is not the same as running down a hill. Running in bare feet is different from running in running shoes which is different yet from running in cleats (Mascolo, 2022). There are some aspects of running that are transferable. But different contexts require developing specific abilities to be successful. Skill is fundamentally a function of context. The level and nature of a skill is different in varied contexts and developmental domains (Mascolo, 2022).

This principle applies to every type of skill we acquire – including the skills involved in comprehending a reading passage or solving a math problem. Developing any type of skill requires repeated practice, experience, and opportunity to learn and generalize skills. Skills are built up gradually through the practice of real activities in real contexts. They are gradually extended (transferred) to new contexts through this same constructive process. “Skills beget skills” (Cunha & Heckman, 2007; Heckman, 2008). Simpler skills support the learning of more sophisticated (and complex) ones (Bailey et al., 2017). Skills are hierarchical, interactive, and dynamic (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Kim, 2020).

Developing skill takes time and effort

The acquisition of expertise in complex tasks such as high-level chess, professional basketball, or firefighting is intricate and slow because expertise in a domain is not a single skill. It’s a large collection of miniskills (Khaneman, 2011). Developing complex and generalized skills requires time and effort (Fischer & Bidell, 2006). Skills draw upon and integrate with other skills. For example, a basketball player has to successfully coordinate and integrate discrete running, jumping, and visual-motor skills to be successful on the court.

These skills are not just integrated. They are interparticipatory and support each other (Fischer & Bidell, 2006). Moreover, these skills are used and organized in specific ways. A successful basketball player may draw upon skills that are used in other sports, but that does not mean they would be successful in football, soccer, or tennis. Again, skills are developed in specific contexts. This is one of the reasons that successful skill transfer is elusive in academic research (Fischer & Bidell, 2006).

Skill development goes through an iterative process of learning, forgetting, re-learning, consolidation, and re-consolidation (Fischer & Bidell, 2006). Patterns of skill development are different between novices, intermediate learners, and experts. The level of children’s skill ability ranges from what they can do on their own with little support (functional level), what they can do with priming or modeling (optimal level), and what they can do with direct participation by someone practiced in that skill (scaffolded level). This interval between a child’s best performances with and without support is their developmental range (Fischer & Bidell, 2006; Fischer, 2008; Cantor et al., 2021). When we test kids in subjects such as reading and math, unless there is a prompt or some other priming, we are evaluating their functional skill level. This gives us a partial picture of the full range of their abilities.

Skill development requires support

Skill development occurs as a function of support and environment (among other factors). Skills are not “all or none.” A person may engage multiple levels of reading comprehension ability depending upon what they are reading and why they are reading it (Catts, 2022). In this sense, just like running there is no single ability called “reading comprehension.” There are different types of reading comprehension. Similarly, there is no such thing as being good at math or not. Math ability is not unitary. There are many aspects of mathematics. Ability in different subcomponents lies on a continuum for everyone (Dowker, 2019).

Levels of support influence where within a person’s developmental range their performance lies in any particular context. Although someone may know how to drive a car, the skill involved in driving a small car is not the same as driving a large truck. The skill involved in driving on a sunny day is different from that involved in driving in the middle of a blizzard (Fischer & Immordino-Yang, 2002). Similarly, the skill involved in reading a recipe, a children’s picture book, and a newspaper article is not the same.

There are two basic preconditions for acquiring a skill: 1) an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable; and 2) an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice (Khaneman, 2011). Children’s skill development is a product of reciprocal interactions between their personal characteristics (skills, interests, motivation, etc.), their environment, and the people and organizations they interact with (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). Academic achievement in part is a function of the opportunities children have to develop skills within their personal systems of support (Byrnes & Miller, 2007).

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But wait, there’s more

If you’d like to learn more about constrained and unconstrained skills, check out these other posts:

Works cited

Afflerbach, P., Pearson, P. D., & Paris, S. G. (2008). Clarifying differences between reading skills and reading strategies. The Reading Teacher, 61(5), 364-373.

Bailey, D., Duncan, G. J., Odgers, C. L., & Yu, W. (2017). Persistence and fadeout in the impacts of child and adolescent interventions. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 10(1), 7-39.

Barrett, L. F. (2020). Seven and a half lessons about the brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In R. M. Lerner & W. Damon (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Theoretical models of human development (6th ed., pp. 793–828). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Bryson, B. (2019). The body: a guide for occupants. New York, Anchor Books.

Byrnes, J. P., & Miller, D. C. (2007). The relative importance of predictors of math and science achievement: An opportunity–propensity analysis. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 32(4), 599-629.

Cantor, P., Osher, D., Berg, J., Steyer, L., & Rose, T. (2021). Malleability, plasticity, and individuality: How children learn and develop in context. In P. Cantor & D. Osher (Eds.), The science of learning and development: Enhancing the lives of all young people (pp. 3-54). New York: Routledge.

Catts, H. W. (2022). Rethinking how to promote reading comprehension. American Educator, 45(4), 26.

Cunha, F., & Heckman, J. (2007). The technology of skill formation. American Economic Review, 97(2), 31-47.

Dowker, A. (2019). Individual differences in arithmetic: Implications for psychology, neuroscience and education. New York: Routledge.

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: 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 (pp. 313–399). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Fischer, K.W. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2002). Cognitive development and education: From dynamic general structure to specific learning and teaching. In E. Lagemann (Ed.), Traditions of scholarship in education. Chicago: Spencer Foundation.

Heckman, J. J. (2008). Schools, skills, and synapses. Economic Inquiry, 46(3), 289-324.

Khaneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kim, Y. S. G. (2020). Hierarchical and dynamic relations of language and cognitive skills to reading comprehension: Testing the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER). Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(4), 667.

Mascolo, M. (2022, July 20). Dynamic skill theory and Piaget's theory: Some basics [Video]. YouTube. Video link.

Stahl, S.A. 2005. Four problems with teaching word meanings (and what to do to make vocabulary an integral part of instruction). In E.H. Hiebert and M.L. Kamil (Eds.), Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.