Transfer on Trial: Intelligence, Cognition, and Instruction

Transfer on Trial is an edited volume, and its two editors were both intelligence researchers of standing. Douglas K. Detterman was a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University; he had founded the journal Intelligence in 1977 and edited it until 2016, and would go on to found the International Society for Intelligence Research in 2000. Robert J. Sternberg was at Yale in 1993, by then well known for the triarchic theory of intelligence — his proposal, set against the standard psychometric account, that intelligence has analytical, creative and practical components. The two come at transfer from the intelligence side of the discipline rather than from instructional design, and the book is shaped by that: it treats whether a skill carries from one situation to another as a question about cognition and intelligence, not only about teaching.

The book was published by Ablex, a smaller academic press, in 1993. As an edited volume its chapters were commissioned and read by the editors rather than passed through journal peer review, and the book is deliberately built as a disagreement: contributors were brought together to argue opposing positions on whether transfer of learning is real and common. Detterman's own opening chapter, "The case for the prosecution: Transfer as an epiphenomenon", states the skeptical case; other contributors, among them Earl Butterfield and James Greeno, argue that transfer exists and is fundamental to complex cognition. A reader should take the volume as a structured debate, not a settled finding — its value is that it puts the strongest forms of both positions next to each other.

The book is part primary, part secondary. The editors' framing chapters are arguments rather than experiments; several contributed chapters review or report empirical transfer studies, and those studies can be chased to their sources. Detterman's prosecution chapter is the reason this volume belongs in a skill-formation set: his claim is that transfer — the carrying of a trained skill into a genuinely new situation — is rare, hard to produce in the laboratory, and easy to mistake for something else, so that much of what is filed under transfer is an artifact of how the experiment was set up. That skepticism bears directly on the acquisition-side sources here. If structured practice in one domain does not reach far beyond that domain, it presses on the deliberate-practice claims of the Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer 1993 Psychological Review paper, and on the assumption behind the cognitive-apprenticeship chapter that coached skill generalises. The editors' stake is intellectual and reputational. No product was sold; this is an academic book. Detterman in particular had a position to defend — a long-held skepticism about easy transfer, consistent with his broader stress on the domain-specificity of cognition — and an edited volume he co-controlled, opened with his own prosecution chapter, is a vehicle well suited to advancing it. The reputational interest is the ordinary one of a scholar staking out a contrarian position in print and assembling the company in which it is argued.