A skill is the ability to act with set results often within a given amount of time, energy, or both. Skills can usually be classified into domain-general and domain-specific skills. Skill normally requires certain environmental provocations and conditions to impose the level of skill being shown and used.
Domain General skills (Cognitive skills):
Research has long verified that intelligence is strongly correlated with academic performance, especially in mathematics. To understand what contributes to this correlation, researchers have investigated separate cognitive elements. For example, executive functioning (McClelland, Acock, & Morrison, 2006) and rapid automatized naming (Georgiou, Tziraki, Manolitsis, & Fella, 2013) have been identified as affecting the learning of early mathematical skills. In particular, visuospatial working memory, which constitutes an aspect of the executive functions, plays an important role in young children’s numeracy skills development (Kyttälä, Aunio, & Hautamäki 2010). LeFevre and colleagues (2010) suggest that the general linguistic pathway is one of the three key developmental pathways by which children acquire numeracy skills. In line with LeFevre et al. (2010), Durand, Hulme, Larkin, and Snowling (2005), and Jordan et al. (2007), deficits in literacy skills may result in slower numeracy development. More specifically, Purpura and Napoli (2015) have found that language skills especially affect informal numeracy knowledge (i.e. flexibly connecting quantities to number words and understanding relations among quantities).
In both the workplace and education, there’s a talk around ‘domain-independent skills’, also called ‘generic’ or ‘transferable’ or ‘Cognitive’ skills. The felt need for those skills is based on the environment we currently live in and the associated demands for lifelong learning.
Particularly, in the context of the workplace, the idea is that organizations change so fast and are so complicated that it’s no longer feasible to know what kind of domain-specific knowledge and skills people need.
Domain-specific skills (Expertise):
Domain-specific learning theories endure that we have many independent, functional knowledge structures, rather than one cohesive knowledge structure. Thus, training in one domain may not impact another specific domain.
For example, core knowledge theorists believe people have highly specialized functions that are independent of one another.
Jean Piaget’s theory of development, on the other hand, believed that knowledge is internalized into a cohesive knowledge structure, favoring the domain-general learning model.
