Abstract : The paper is organized into five major sections and a summary. Each of the five major sections is devoted to a different aspect of our analysis of proof skills in geometry and their acquisition. The first section presents an analysis of how a student searches for a proof in geometry after he has acquired his basic skills. This provides a basic framework within which to understand each of the types of learning that we then discuss in the remaining four sections. The second section is concerned with what we call text learning. It is concerned with what the student directly encodes from the text, and more importantly, the processes that use this direct encoding to guide the problem solving. The third section is concerned with a process that we call subsumption, a means by which the student encodes new information into existing knowledge structures. Fourth, we discuss the processes of knowledge compilation by which knowledge is transformed from its initial encoded form, which is declarative, to a more effective procedural form. The final major section discusses how practice serves to tune and optimize the skill so that the proof search is performed more successfully. (Author)