Parts of Intellectual Skill

WHEN one begins to think about the application of learning principles to instruction, there is always one worthwhile question to be asked. What is to be learned? The responses to that question may fall into one of three general classes – intellectual skills, cognitive strategies, information, behavioural patterns, or attitudes. Of course, learning intellectual skills is of central importance to school learning. An intellectual skill makes it possible for an individual to respond to his environment through symbols, in which language and numerals represent natural objects of the environment. In other words, individuals communicate aspects of their experience to others by using such symbols. For most instructional purposes, the valuable distinctions among intellectual skills are discriminations, concrete concepts, defined concepts, rules, and problem-solving.

Discrimination is the capability of making different responses to stimuli that differ from each other between one or more physical dimensions. Most simply, a person indicates by responding that two stimuli are the same or different, for instance, in art, music, foreign language, and science. Discrimination is essential to intellectual skills. As far as most school learning is concerned, relevant discriminations are usually supposed to have been learnt early in life. In describing the characteristics of discrimination as well as other types of intellectual skill to follow, it is necessary to account for three components of a learning situation: the performance that is required, the internal conditions present for learning to occur, and the external conditions which provide stimulation to a learner.

A concept is a capability that makes it possible for an individual to identify a stimulus as a member of a class having some characteristics in common even though differing from each other markedly. A concrete concept expresses an object property or object attribute such as colour and shape in that the human performance these concepts call for is recognition of a concrete object. The marked difference between discrimination and concept is that the former means responding to a difference, whereas the latter refers to describing something by name or otherwise. To be said better, acquiring a concrete concept has the meaning that the individual is capable of showing the class of object characteristics. The acquisition of concepts by definition requires that the learner be able to verify the referents of words used in the definition. An individual is deemed to have learned a defined concept when he can demonstrate the meaning of some particular class of objects, events or relations. The demonstration may include verbal reference to the definition, and demonstration of the meaning distinguishes a kind of mental processing from that involved in memorized verbal information. Only by assuring that the individual is capable of proving the referents of words can one be confident that the meaning of a defined concept has been learned. In practice, the procedure of obtaining verbal answers to oral questions is often used, but such a procedure is always subject to the ambiguity that the learner may be repeating a verbalization, not knowing the meaning of the concept after all. Hence, a learner had better get a genuine understanding of a defined concept instead of the superficial acquaintance indicated by reeling off a string of words.

Regarding rules, the learner’s performance is regular in a variety of specific situations. The learner is able to respond with a class of relationships among classes of objects and events. There are many common examples of rule-governed behaviour. Most human behaviour comes into this category. Obviously enough, possessing the capability called a rule does not mean being able to state it verbally. If a rule is a defined concept, it is not actually formally different from a rule and is learned in much the same way. Rules, however, contain many other categories apart from classifying. What I want to mean is that they deal with such relationships as equal to, similar to, greater than, less than, before, after and many others.

Sometimes, the rules we have learned are complex combinations of simpler rules. These higher-order rules are invented for the purpose of solving a practical problem in the real world. The capability of problem-solving is naturally a major aim of educational processes; most educators agree that the school should give priority to teaching students how to think clearly. When students work out the solution to a problem of authentic events, they will engage in thinking behaviour. Thus, various kinds of problems may have as many solutions as possible. However, attaining a workable solution to the problem is a new capability of student achievement. They will be able to learn something that can be generalized to other issues of similar formal characteristics. This also means that they will have acquired a new rule or perhaps a new set of rules.

In summary, problem-solving consists of the formation of higher-ordered rules, which could be related to rules, defined concepts, concrete concepts, and discriminations as prerequisites in order or vice versa. Rules play an essential part in problem-solving. For a learner, acquiring all the rules needed for every situation is always impossible in one way or another. Concepts and rules must be synthesized into new complex forms for the learner to cope with new problematic situations by adding to a student’s repertoire of intellectual skills relevant to those tasks. Briefly speaking, problem-solving is a human activity of previously acquired concepts and rules, not a genetic skill at all.

By Hu Wo (Cuckoo’s Song)

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