Abstract
The study of skill acquisition, as DeKeyser (1997) declares, is an important area within cognitive psychology. What is undeniable in skill acquisition is the fact that through extensive practice, the degree of attention on a task decreases and the task is performed without stopping; furthermore, the rate of error considerably decreases. The paper, in an attempt to work on situating the concept of practice in skill acquisition, goes on to hold that since each context has its own specific encoding cues, and that the skill achieved in that specific context is too specific to be transferred to other contexts, the degree of automaticity in employing the skill in that context is plausibly more than the other contexts.
Highlights
Skill specificity as a new issue within the skill acquisition theory has attracted the attention of several researchers (e.g., Anderson, 1985; Dekeyser, 1997)
Skill specificity refers to the issue that performance improves most in the type of task that has been practiced (Dekeyser, 1997), i.e., production practice leads to increased production skills, and comprehension practice to increased comprehension skills
The procedural knowledge is too specific to be transferred from one skill to another
Summary
Skill specificity as a new issue within the skill acquisition theory has attracted the attention of several researchers (e.g., Anderson, 1985; Dekeyser, 1997). The paper, in revisiting the nature of specificity of practice, asserts that those who develop the knowledge enjoy some form of privileged status in memory because information can be retrieved more and faster. In this regard, Schunk (2012) claims, “retrieval depends on the manner of encoding” Students who received the list recalled more of the states on the list and fewer states not on it (Brown, 1968, cited in Schunk, 2012, p. 201)
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