Question One: How Do We Perform Skills?

• 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 synap...

• 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) tran...

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

• Expert-novice differences. Experts appear to represent ideas at a d...

• 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

• 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 spec...

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...