Introduction

The main goal of learning is to acquire knowledge and, through its use, develop certain skills. The acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills are interconnected intellectual activities. In this regard, several patterns can be identified. First, a learner acquires certain knowledge. To this end, a learner needs a number of skills. Generally speaking, one should be able to learn. The ability to learn is a part of learner's personality and it is in this sense that one can talk about individual abilities and skills. Through the process of education the ability to learn develops into such skills as the acquisition, systematization, and generalization of knowledge.

New knowledge brings about skills that are professional in nature. Such newer acquired professionalism affects individual abilities of a learner by changing and transforming them. Ideally, active utilization of emerging professional skills prompts the need for acquiring new knowledge. This appears to be a recurrent process in which each state of the development of individual abilities depends on an earlier stage of knowledge acquisition. Through this process, new knowledge acquired by an individual transforms into professional skills. Such a chain of transformations in the development of individual and professional skills is inherent to the whole process of education.

Essentially, knowledge and skills when considered jointly can be conceptualized as a dual pair. Abilities differ from skills according to their complexity. A combination of knowledge, skills and abilities (often referred to as KSA) of an individual belongs to his or her cognitive register. However, for the purpose of description undertaken in this paper, this is not important. In general, knowledge itself is meaningless unless one is able to apply it. In turn, the ability of application is weak without information that underpins it; that is, ability is meaningless when separated from knowledge. There exist many dual pairs of that type. The simplest example of such a pair is information and its carrier. Another such a pair may be the soul and body. The goal of this paper is to suggest a concise classification that systematically describes skills and abilities.

Education and environment

Knowledge and skills acquired by an individual constitute a prerequisite base for any learning process. In other words, the process of education and the development of individual abilities and professional skills spans throughout the whole life. In different times, this process varies in terms of direction and pace. In that sense, education is a sub-concept of a more general notion of behavior [1]. According to the theory of behavior, education is a response of an object to environmental events. Here, an object is understood in a broader sense than a man. Studies at the tertiary level usually occur in the midst of one's life span. These studies are well controlled and goal-oriented. At the same time the acquisition of such basic abilities as walking is quite different from skills that develop through formal schooling. Here, imitation becomes the main vehicle of learning. Sometimes, learning is influenced by such factors as fear, pain, threat, etc. This paper is concerned with the description and analysis of goal-oriented and controlled skills that develop as a result of formal schooling. It should be noted that the general theory of behavior deals with different types of environmental influences on an individual, including aspects dealing with information and energy. This paper focuses on the study of informational aspect of behavior.

Two types of skills

One may note that because a creative individual, expert and man in general can be described in terms of their skills and abilities, these features are essentially individual. Although our knowledge about the world around us is limited, the sum of abilities, skills and knowledge base is unique for each individual. As it was mentioned above, all individual skills can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of skills related to one's professional life which, in particular, includes learnings. These are called specialized skills. The second group consists of skills connected to intra-personal and psychological features of an individual. These are called individual skills.

Specialized and individual skills differ according to their complexity. The levels of such complexity can be used in developing criteria for the grouping of these skills. As mentioned elsewhere [2], specialized skills can be divided into three groups: basic skills, vocational skills, and advanced skills. This simple hierarchy of specialized skills was also found useful in the description of skills that enable one's participation in different games [3]. It is interesting to note that terminology suggested for the characterization of the stages of specialized skills in the context of games terminology coincide with that used in [2]. However, no specific terminology was assigned to describe levels of complexity of individual skills. Usually, one simply refers to such levels as higher and lower ones. Nonetheless, by using criteria developed for specialized skills, an appropriate three-level hierarchy can be suggested for individual skills according to the degree of their integration.

Factors affecting skills' change

Regardless of their level, both specialized and individual skills are subject to change as the time progresses. Two factors that characterize the time-dependence of these skills can be identified. The first factor deals with age. The age factor is linked to one's development, educational experience, acquisition of practical competence, and so on. The second factor deals with socio-cultural issues such as the development of new knowledge, advances in technology, proliferation of political ideas and like. The second factor deals with evolutional changes in the society. The age factor in the context of skills has a relatively high rate of alteration and can be identical for different people. The influence of evolutional factors on the skills is inert and non-reversible. Furthermore, specialized skills are more changeable than individual skills.

In the process of age-related changes, specialized skills alter most actively at the basic and vocational levels. All skills can be arranged in groups associated with different educational levels: primary grades, secondary school, pre-college studies, underclassmen, and finally, novice specialists. In such a way, specific skills come into existence at a particular point of time in the activity of an individual. At all stages of individual activity, the specialized skills of advanced and basic levels have an interdisciplinary nature and it is in that sense they can be conceptualized as generalized skills [4].

Most of individual skills are interdisciplinary ones regardless of their level. In other words, individual skills are mostly generalized skills. Many skills that belong to different levels of specialized skills are the basis for those associated with individual skills. The inverse statement is also true. Indeed, when a child learns how to count or how to write, he or she acquires specialized skills. When counting and writing skills reach a certain level of maturity, the child starts using them as individual skills. If this child becomes a mathematician or poet, his or her individual skills become transformed back into specialized skills, yet at a higher cognitive level.

In such a way, the process of education of an individual characterizes by two dual, inseparable pairs. First pair &endash; knowledge/abilities (perception, ordering) &endash; is content-related. Second pair &endash; ability-to-learn/ability-to-enact (activity, creativity) &endash; is process-related. Both pairs are robustly connected to each other. In this regard note that any process that characterizes the development of an individual, resembles, to some extent, a staircase with even and odd steps being shifted about each other. More specifically, if even step characterizes one's knowledge acquisition, then odd step characterizes one's professional activities and creative endeavors; that is, the application of knowledge. By developing and learning, one moves up step-by-step progressing from learning to the application of knowledge and then again, returns to learning but at a higher ground.

Developing skills list

One can describe practical opportunities of an individual at different stages of goal-oriented learnings by analyzing the list of skills that the individual possesses at the time of investigation. A generalized description of an individual can be obtained by averaging up such lists for a number of individuals. This description can then be compared over a desired list of skills. Such a list can be developed through a theoretical analysis as well as educated estimation carried out using standard methodologies [2]. The notion of a specific skill or facility can be formed on the basis of the analysis of different descriptions of and requirements to an individual. In other words, these very notions reside at the intersection of different individual features. This means that skills and abilities are, in fact, some general attributes of an individual. In Russian literature [5, 6], such a general description of an individual or any object for that matter, is sometimes referred to as "meron" &endash; a word apparently borrowed from Greek.

The completeness of description and exact definition of each of the skills and abilities require multiple informative characteristics that are independent of each other. It is usually agreed that their number should not be less than seven. A further increase of such characteristics does not really affect the essence of skills and abilities [7, 8]. In order to study a learning process and its influence on learner's personality, it is important to identify and then classify all essential skills and abilities. In other words, one of the main goals of pedagogical science is to create a sufficiently convenient and visually enhanced taxonomy of skills and abilities.

Bloom's taxonomy

Both Russian and Western educators have been struggling with this issue for a long time. It should be noted, however, that Western pedagogy uses the term taxonomy rather that classification in the description of knowledge and skills related to the process of education. On the contrary, in Russian literature, the term taxonomy has not been used in education at all but rather in other fields of disciplined inquiry (e.g., in biology). Historically, it so happened that in the West the main attention was given to individual knowledge and skills that are important from an educational perspective. Such research is associated with the work of Benjamin Bloom, his co-authors and followers [8-10]. This research is so well known and has been referred to so often in educational literature that the term "Bloom's taxonomy" is commonly used without any references. The very title Taxonomy of Educational Objectives [8,9] has been used widely for the description of different classifications of individual skills of a learner. On the contrary, Russian research on this topic has both Western flavor of psychological investigation as well as activity-oriented emphasis. This made it possible to create classifications of creativity and, most importantly, specialized skills. A comprehensive review of this research along with the list of most important specialized engineering skills can be found in [2, 11]. The first attempt to integrate both approaches is presented in [12].

Hierarchy of skills

An analysis of all classification systems of skills possessed by a learner and novice professional during his or her inductive years into a profession shows that each type of skills has a hierarchical structure. The content of each level of such a structure changes as studies go along. While individual skills and abilities have very stable nature, professional skills and abilities significantly change during one's process of education and further professional activity. In addition, the evolutional change factor of professional abilities as a consequence of the technological advancement of society can be easily recognized through an appropriately designed research [13].

Presently, all skills and abilities that underlie one's development in the course of education can be divided into the following groups: (i) cognitive, (ii) affective, (iii) mental, (iv) professional, and (v) social. The first three groups of skills are pure personal characteristics of an individual. They naturally develop and sharpen off through one's studies, practical activities and everyday interaction with the environment. At the same time, the last two groups of skills that characterize an individual are determined first of all by the course of the whole process of education and upbringing activities, both explicit and implicit. It is the development of these individual characteristics that should be the main focus of the process of education.

The substance of each group of abilities in different periods of the process of education and at different stages of the hierarchical staircase, their meanings and interrelation are described in one or other form in the work cited above. In order to improve the quality of the process of educational formation, the degree of maturity of skills associated with the last two groups should continuously or, at least, periodically be taken under control during the whole process of education. To this end, one has to use testing, questionnaires, one-to-one discussions and other methods of assessment. Undoubtedly, it is desirable yet sufficiently difficult to attempt connecting the formation of the skills of the last two groups with individual characteristics being associated with the other three groups. These features (abilities, skills) should be under control also during the whole period of educational process as well as through the orientation sessions carried out by an educational agency.

Computers and the development of skills

The authors argue that successful organization and planning of the process of education can not be solely based on psychological skills and abilities accumulated by the learners. An important although very difficult task is to blend both groups of individual characteristics. Presently, such a unified approach is used only for professional orientation. In that case, based on the study of psychological features of an individual, one makes a conclusion about a feasible set of those professional characteristics that is useful to develop in each concrete case. At the same time, the appreciation of psychological skills and abilities of a learner could and should be considered as a fundamental strategy for education of each individual. So, the use of computational learning environments capable of statistical processing of information about hidden educational processes [2, 11] enables one to identify skills and abilities manifested by each learner in the process of solving educational as well as real-life problems. An example of an application of such programs sensitive to analysis of hidden educational processes is an identification and then conditional grouping of students according to the types of responsive reaction to problems and assignments that may differ from student to student. One group includes reactive students who provide many answers in a given time period, yet with a high degree of errors. Another group consists of thoughtful students who provide fewer answers in a given time period yet has a higher degree of correct responses in comparison with the first group. In order to foster the same professional skills among students in both groups its is useful to offer them problems of different types within the same topic. Instructors should also be provided with an appropriate theoretical and practical training in order to be able to continuously carry out professionally correct alterations of such problems. That kind of training is based on one's ability to quickly classify a set of skills for a particular student. This example is very informative for it shows that the classification of skills and abilities is not just of a theoretical interest. Such a classification should serve as a foundation for specific practical recommendations regarding the methods of teaching within any domain of professional activity. That is why familiarity with taxonomy of skills and abilities should be a required part of the preparation of qualified teachers.

References

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2. Nikitina, G.V., and Romanenko, V.N. (1992). The development of creative abilities in vocational education (in Russian). St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press.

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4. Usova, A.V. (1974). The development of generalized skills and abilities (in Russian). Narodnoe Obrasovanie (Public Education), 4.

5. Chaikovsky, Yu. V. (1990). Elements of Evolutionary Dyatropics (in Russian). Moscow: Nauka Press.

6. Romanenko, V.N. (1997). Fundamentals of the theory of varieties (in Russian). St Petersburg: St Petersburg University Press.

7. Solomatin, N.M., and Beliaev, V.A. (1997). Computers and the search of information (in Russian). Moscow: Soviet Radio press.

8. A Committee of College and University Examiners. (1965). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. David McKay: New York.

9. Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B. S., and Masia, B.B. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals. Handbook II: Affective Domain. Longman: New York.

10. Anderson L.W., and Karthwohl, D.R. (Eds). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. Longman: New York.

11. Abramovich, S., Nikitina, G., and Romanenko, V. (2002). Developing practical competence of future engineers within a theory-oriented curriculum at the tertiary level. Herald of Education and Sciences Development of Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, 4 (special issue in English), pp.24-30.

12. Romanenko, V.N., Nikitina, G.V, and Abramovich, S. (2003). Abilities and Skills [on-line materials]. http://www2.potsdam.edu/educ/abramovs/romnikabsite.htm

13. Nikitina, G.V., and Romanenko, V.N. (2001). Technology and its influence on requirements to the basic engineering skills. Pedagogical Informatics (Pedagogicheskaja Informatika), 3, pp. 16-19. (In Russian).