Chapter 5: “If Green was a and Blue Was B”: Isomorphism as an Instructable Matter

It would seem that no exploration of memory practices and learning would be complete if it did not in some way address the question of how past learning is recovered and made relevant for current needs and purposes. This is a form of memory practice both specialized and ubiquitous. It is also crucial, for without it, learning would be of little practical use. Indeed, the ability to reapply skills and knowledge acquired in the past might seem to be exactly what we mean when we say something has been learned. So it is not at all surprising that this issue has commanded the attention of psychologists and educators for well over a century. The phenomenon has been studied under a variety of names including knowledge transfer, transfer-of-training, and transfer-of-learning (see, for example, Detterman, 1993; Lave, 1988; Marton, 2006; Royer, Mestre, & Dufresne, 2005; Tuomi-Gröhn & Engeström, 2003). Thorndike and Judd, two leading learning theorists of the last century, developed influential theories concerning the factors that facilitate transfer. Transfer, for them, was an empirical matter measured as the difference in the rates at which experimental subjects learn a trial task subsequent to performing a training task compared with subjects who receive no prior exposure. Thorndike and Woodworth (1901) demonstrated that the probability of facilitative transfer increased with the number of elements held in common between the training task and the target task. Judd (1908), on the other hand, posited that nontrivial transfer depends upon developing an appreciation of a task’s deep structure. Extensive subsequent work has built upon and elaborated these two theories. Despite the massive attention it has received over the years, efforts to identify ways of improving transfer have been, for the most part, less than successful (Detterman, 1993; Lave, 1988).