What is a skill?
Have you ever wondered what a skill is?
To simplify, and for the sake of our demonstration, let’s just say that it’s an individual’s ability to mobilize his or her knowledge to carry out a task.
Now, the skills approach is interesting in that it highlights a very simple fact: while we may have mastered a piece of knowledge, we sometimes fail to mobilize that knowledge to carry out a task.
Let’s take an example. All adults know how to add and subtract. They have this mathematical knowledge.
But take the following test and ask your friends and family this little problem:
“I bought a pétanque ball and a jack. I paid €1.10. The boule costs €1 more than the cochonnet. How much does the jack cost?”
The answer many people give is “10 centimes” (reasoning that the set costs €1.10, so the boule costs €1 and the cochonnet costs 10 centimes).
However, the correct answer is “5 centimes”, because it says: “The boule costs 1 € more than the cochonnet.” But the ball costs 1 € and the jack 10 centimes, which makes a difference of 90 centimes, not 1 €.
The solution then is :
1,10 € = 1,05 € + 0,05 €
And 1,05 € – 0,05 €, that makes a difference of one euro.
If you’ve done the test with your friends and family and they’ve got it wrong, how can you explain their error? Probably not because they don’t know how to calculate, but because a deceptively obvious fact (“10 centimes”) jumps out at us. Perhaps we’re going a little too fast, too.
This shows that knowledge is not predictive of task performance. This is what makes the skills-based approach so interesting.
