Transfer does exist, although limited, and occurs only in certain circumstances. In some conditions the degree of transfer approaches zero while in other conditions it is significant. Thus, the task is to find those conditions in which transfer works fairly well, and to design teaching thinking skills-tasks to ensure the best transfer. The degree of the transfer may be different for each skill and for every possible pair of domains. Furthermore, the transferability of a skill depends on the conditions under which it was mastered.
It is more productive to hypothese a low level of transfer. Caution and awareness of the limitations of transfer should be taken into account when designing content-based methods for training thinking.
Three main plausible limitations should be considered:
- Even if a skill that is potentially transferable is mastered within one domain, transferability is not a feature that comes automatically with a skill. To make them transferable, further specific training is required.
- The type and content of the teaching thinking skills determines how broad the tranfer can be. Skills can be more easily transferred into close, familiar content areas that into distant and unknown fields.
- The skill itself cannot be transferred into another domain; rather transfer means an improved ability to learn skill (with the same or similar structure) in new content areas. The consequence of these constraints for content-based training is that the training exercises must be embedded into every relevant academic subject.
While the very essence of teaching thinking by using the content of learning materials is the transferability of the skills, a more elaborate conception of improving transfer is needed. For this, the sub-domains should be considered as basic units of subject matter that use a consistent set of concepts, facts and domain-specific thinking skills. Within such a unit, transfer is not questionable, because a skill is considered to be aquired if it works for the whole of such a unit. However, the content of the sub-domains is different and transfer between them is not automatic. The topics of the traditional school subjects are such sub-domains. For example, the content of geomtery obviously differs from the content of algebra, although both are fields of mathematics. Similarly, mechanics has a content different from optics. In order to make a skill transferable, teaching thinking skills in the content of more than one sub-domain is required. This makes it possible to generalise the skill, and to detach the structure of the skill from its actual content. If a skill is trained with materials from only two different sub-domains, then its transfer into any other area cannot be expected. However, the presumption that the skill will work in at least these two content areas is plausible. Furthermore, another plausible assumption is that after the skill is mastered in two different fields, it will be learned in a third field more easily. Extending this reasoning, the more content areas a skill is trained in the easier it can be learned in a new domain.
Designing teaching thinking materials in the content areas
The assumption that cultivating the mind should be the primary goal of school instruction is unquestionable. Accordingly, the task of teaching thinking cannot be completed in one or even a few separate courses. Improving thinking has to be a continuos goal for the entire period of compulsory schooling from the very first day to the final years or even further, until the completion of higher education.
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