ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a perspective on transfer that explains the conflicting findings just mentioned and defines tactics that should promote transfer in the teaching of thinking skills or other knowledge and know-how. A look at the meaning of transfer is a necessary step toward examining its psychology. The conditions for transfer of learning have become a crucial issue in contemporary efforts to understand the causes of skilled thinking and to foster such thinking through education. The key to understanding the nature of transfer and the conflicting findings mentioned earlier is the recognition that transfer is not one phenomenon; transfer can occur in radically different ways. Low road transfer is by far the most common route by which learning generalizes. High road transfer proceeds in a very different way from low road, through the mindful abstraction and application of principles. Heuristic instruction characteristically stresses high road transfer.
