How Much Transfer Should We Expect Between Skills? - Scott H Young - Deepstash
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Three Questions

Three Questions

  1. How do we perform skills?
  2. How do we acquire them?
  3. What sorts of skills are used in real life?

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Question One: How Do We Perform Skills?

Question One: How Do We Perform Skills?

Essentially, transfer is a product of overlap. We should expect transfer from one skill to another when something in those two skills is essentially the same.

  • Broad mental faculties. In this framework , “reasoning” or “memory” overlap across different skills.
  • Stimulus-response. This view would suggest transfer is extraordinarily limited—every superficial change in a situation would require a new skill.
  • Propositions and productions. Theories like ACT-R argue that our brains store skills in essentially two forms: small chunks of factual knowledge and simple component procedures

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Transfer Theories

  • Schemas : Schema-based theories claim that knowledge is organized in patterns larger than individual actions or chunks.
  • Neural networks: Teasing out implications for transfer is harder here, but it would most likely look like an overlap in the synaptic connectivity between two skills.
  • Activity systems In this view, the person relies on their environment to perform a skill, and transfer fails when those environmental supports are altered.

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Skill Transfer Requisite

  • From this perspective, what seems safe to say is that skills can only reliably influence each other if they overlap in either their procedures or knowledge.
  • If two skills don’t use the same process, and the knowledge they depend on is different, there shouldn’t be much (if any) transfer.

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Question Two: How Do We Acquire Skills?

Question Two: How Do We Acquire Skills?

There’s also the issue of how we acquire these representations.

  • Expert-novice differences. Experts appear to represent ideas at a deeper level than novices .
  • Automaticity effects . Skills tend to recede from conscious awareness with experience.
  • Declarative-to-procedural transitions. . This transformation implies that skills may have different patterns of transfer at different levels of mastery as their dominant mental representation changes.
  • Cognitive load. Studying an example, for instance, is better than solving a problem when cognitive load is high, but the opposite is true when itis low.

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Pitfalls To Avoid

  • Don’t judge transfer potential by the abilities of novices.
  • Don’t judge transfer on one-shot problem-solving tests.
  • Don’t trust experts’ perceptions of how they do a task. Experts are bad at introspecting their cognitive procedures. We tend to underrate knowledge we’ve already acquired, seeing it as obvious.

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Question Three: How are Skills Used in Real Life?

Question Three: How are Skills Used in Real Life?

  • Critics allege that much of what we learn in school has little real-world application.
  • John Anderson reports that employers either want very basic skills or highly specific skills that no universal curriculum could aspire to.
  • Peter Cappelli argues that surveys show employers tend not to highly value academic skills.

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Summarizing

If you take one thing from this article, it should be that transfer is complicated.

  • Transfer should be minimal between unrelated skills.
  • Transfer between related subjects depends on how much they overlap in content and procedures.
  • Academic subjects can transfer to real life, but this transfer can fail because:
  • We are missing components of the skill for applying it.
  • We haven’t automated the skill enough to pass the cost-benefit threshold.
  • We can’t actually perform the skill with only our academic ability.
  • Many academic skills are inert .

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kokhul_736

Kokhulash.com

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