The Analysis of Practical Skills.

Singleton, W. T. (Hrsg.):

ISBN 10: 0852001991 / ISBN 13: 9780852001998

Published by Lancaster MTP Press Limited, 1978

About this Item

XIII + 333 S. The Study of Real Skills. Volume 1. Mit s/w Abb. Mit Su. Der Su. hat auf dem Hinterdeckel einige Kratzer. Die Kapitale sind bestoßen. Die Kopfecke des Hinterdeckels ist bestoßen. Gutes Exemplar. This book is about human skilled performance. The problem is to analyse, describe and understand how a skilled man carries out his task. 'Skilled' is used not merely in the sense of a man who has served an extensive period of training but more generally to describe the activity of any individual who, by training and experience, has developed specific attributes. These attributes are evidenced by the effectiveness with which he conducts some specialised activity. Some of these skills are shared by most people, e.g. walking, whilst others are very rare, e.g. flying aeroplanes. The most obvious value of an increased knowledge about skill is for those concerned with selection, training, manpower assessment, allocation or planning. Much of the 'power' of a man lies in his skills, and choices of individuals for jobs or methods of training people for jobs equally depend on knowing what attributes are required to carry out the particular jobs. A knowledge of required skills is assumed, although often implicitly, by designers including all kinds of engineers, architects, planners, industrial designers and system designers. They are designing environments and jobs for people and are simultaneously demanding and shaping skilled performance. Some of their art depends on keeping the demands reasonable. The skills of the people who will be involved, either as the operators or customers, in whatever is being designed must be understood and respected so that the people concerned are neither overloaded nor underestimated. Task analysis and skills analysis has been carried out in many different forms particularly by work-study engineers, training officers, psychologists and ergonomists. There are representatives from these fields among the authors of the various chapters. Progress in the techniques of skills analysis has been slow because of the variety and totally integrated nature of human skill and because the objectives of the analysts have been so different. These objectives may range from productivity, through health, safety, training, job design to the progress of academic knowledge. Because the methods and techniques involved are not very highly standardised this book has been designed to convey what knowledge we have by illustration. Each chapter is written by a specialist in a particular kind of job or skill and he describes his efforts to analyse that activity. Preliminary and concluding chapters attempt respectively to explain some of the origins of these studies and to assess the state of the art. The book should be of interest to all the practitioners already mentioned and is intended also as reading for final-year undergraduate and pöstgraduate students in subjects such as the biological and social sciences and management. sehr guter Zustand Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 810.

Seller Inventory # 12712

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Analysis of Practical Skills.
• Publisher: Lancaster MTP Press Limited
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0852001991
• ISBN 13: 9780852001998
• Binding: Gr. 8° Groß-Oktav Kldr. Kldr.
• Condition: Gut
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 810 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Psychologie

About this title

Synopsis

The origins of this book are in my first attempts to understand psychology as a post-war student in the Cambridge of the late 1940s. Sir Frederic Bartlett and his colleagues in the Psychology Department were talking and writing about the concept of the skill as the fundamental unit of behaviour. This made entire sense to me but not apparently to very many other people because the movement dwindled rapidly with the retirement of Sir Frederic in 1952. It got lost within performance studies which were essentially behaviouristic and stimulus-response in origin, a quite different style of thinking from the gestalt approach of skill psychology. This is not a simple dichotomy of course and skill psychology does go some way towards the analytic approach in accepting that a science needs to have a basic element, a unit from which the complexities of real behaviour can be constructed. into which it can be analysed and in terms of which it can be described and understood. The trick is to pick the right unit and I think that skills is an appropriate unit for human behaviour. Note the plural, although these units are elements they are not identical any more than the ninety-odd elements of the physical world are identical. The issue is sometimes clarified by considering the analogy with the attempt to describe a house. The simplest observable elements here are the brick. the piece of stone or the piece of wood.