<ul><li>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. </li><li>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.</li></ul>

Skill Transfer Requisite 

<ol><li>How do we perform skills? </li><li>How do we acquire them? </li><li>What sorts of skills are used in real life? </li> </ol>

Three Questions 

<ul><li>Schemas : Schema-based theories claim that knowledge is organized in patterns larger than individual actions or chunks. </li><li>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.</li><li>Activity systems In this view, the person relies on their environment to perform a skill, and transfer fails when those environmental supports are altered.</li></ul>

Transfer Theories

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.<ul><li>Broad mental faculties. In <a href="https://dictionary.apa.org/formal-discipline">this framework </a>, “reasoning” or “memory” overlap across different skills.</li><li>Stimulus-response. This view would suggest transfer is extraordinarily limited—every superficial change in a situation would require a new skill.</li><li>Propositions and productions. Theories like <a href="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2022/02/15/act-r/">ACT-R </a>argue that our brains store skills in essentially two forms: small chunks of factual knowledge and simple component procedures</li></ul>

Question One: How Do We Perform Skills?

If you take one thing from this article, it should be that transfer is complicated.<ul><li>Transfer should be minimal between unrelated skills.</li><li>Transfer between related subjects depends on how much they overlap in content and procedures. </li><li>Academic subjects can transfer to real life, but this transfer can fail because:</li><li class="ql-indent-1">We are missing components of the skill for applying it. </li><li class="ql-indent-1">We haven’t automated the skill enough to pass the cost-benefit threshold.</li><li class="ql-indent-1">We can’t actually perform the skill with only our academic ability.</li><li class="ql-indent-1">Many academic skills are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_knowledge">inert </a>. </li></ul>

Summarizing

There’s also the issue of how we acquire these representations.<ul><li>Expert-novice differences. Experts appear to represent ideas at a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220480253_Categorization_and_Representation_of_Physics_Problems_by_Experts_and_Novices">deeper level than novices </a>. </li><li>Automaticity effects . Skills tend to recede from conscious awareness with experience. </li><li>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.</li><li>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. </li></ul>

Question Two: How Do We Acquire Skills?

<ul><li>Critics allege that much of what we learn in school has little real-world application.</li><li>John Anderson <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Learning-Memory-Integrated-John-Anderson/dp/0471249254">reports </a>that employers either want very basic skills or highly specific skills that no universal curriculum could aspire to. </li><li>Peter Cappelli <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Why-Good-People-Cant-Jobs/dp/B00FJUFFD8/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=Smadj&content-id=amzn1.sym.22f5776b-4878-4918-9222-7bb79ff649f4&pf_rd_p=22f5776b-4878-4918-9222-7bb79ff649f4&pf_rd_r=138-5005353-2745032&pd_rd_wg=vgzAZ&pd_rd_r=36883576-42ee-403e-89ee-0ccca61e0046&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk">argues </a>that surveys show employers tend not to highly value academic skills.</li></ul>

Question Three: How are Skills Used in Real Life?

<ul><li>Don’t judge transfer potential by the abilities of novices. </li><li>Don’t judge transfer on one-shot problem-solving tests. </li><li>Don’t trust experts’ perceptions of how they do a task. Experts are <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adaptive-Unconscious/dp/0674013824">bad at introspecting </a>their cognitive procedures. We tend to underrate knowledge we’ve already acquired, seeing it as obvious. </li></ul>

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