Per the <a href="/wiki/Advanced_Skills_(Guide)" title="Advanced Skills (Guide)">Advanced Skills (Guide)</a>, relevant storylets are divided into three categories: those that can unlock, those that can train, and those that can both unlock and train.

Many of the storylets for the early Parabola advanced skills (e.g. MA, GW, APoC, KT, Mithridacy) can be used to both unlock and train a skill, so it's quite convenient -- learn of a skill, and then just repeat the storylet to gain more CP.

However, you won't be unlocking the skills before you get access to Parabola. Storylets accessible before that (e.g. <a href="/wiki/Have_a_taste_of_the_Toxicology_Exhibit" title="Have a taste of the Toxicology Exhibit">Have a taste of the Toxicology Exhibit</a> or defending from Slights) can generally train a skill, but won't unlock it.

AotRS is a Railway skill, but this experiment comes from Whitsun equipment that can be acquired long before a player gets to the Railway. Ergo, you can use it to train AotRS, but it won't unlock the skill.

That said, the explanatory text in the experimental results does seem to be confusing. It should say something like "AotRS has not changed from 0 because it's lower than 1." because the CP reward check should have a minimum base skill level of 1 and a maximum base skill level of 5+Artisan Studies, and the code would read something like "AotrS has not changed from $level because it's lower than $minimum_level.".

This experiment's check may have been previously bugged to check the modified skill level rather than base skill level. This would allow the wearing of equipment to bypass the minimum limit, but would probably also prevent someone who was wearing a lot of AorRS gear from training even if their base level was still under 7 (as their modified skill level would be beyond the maximum limit of 5+Artisan Studies).

Unfortunately, I've started Railway so I have AotRS unlocked, so I can't directly test this. I did do this experiment around Whitsun when I didn't have any AotRS, but I doubt I was wearing any AotRS equipment at the time so the fact that I didn't get any CP of AotRS back then isn't helpful.