Six Questions to Ask Your Teachers About Transfer of Learning

In school, you spend years studying before you do anything that actually resembles the real thing. This is more an artifact of educational system than an ideal path to mastery. Knowledge tends to be more skill like than we assume. How common are tasks with greater than 100 % transfer? Reading in a language exposes you to a great variety of vocabulary. You can stop to look up words, so that's easier to learn. reading also reduces cognitive load. So even when doing something else may benefit skill acquisition rather than direct practice, some skills simply aren't learnable at all.