ABSTRACT

Perhaps the most central question in education is transfer, how knowledge from one experience-say, an arithmetic class-is utilized in another situation-a science class or shopping in a grocery store. As Singley and Anderson (1989) reviewed, the transfer that actually occurs often compares poorly to naive ex­ pectations about how much should occur. The issue of transfer has been one of increasing interest in cognitive science as researchers try to come to grips with the nature of knowledge and skill. One might view the recent surge of in­ terest in situated learning (Collins et al., 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1990) as based on the premises that skills cannot transfer across contexts and that one needs to learn them in the context of application. ACT-R does not take quite as depress­ ing a view on the possibilities for transfer, but it does expect a fair degree of specificity in transfer.