The Acquisition of Procedures from Text: A Production-System Analysis of Transfer of Training

Learning a cognitive skill from written instructions can be viewed as consisting of con-verting the propositional content of the written material into a representation of procedural knowledge, such as production rules. In a transfer of training experiment, subjects learned from step-by-step instructions a series of related procedures, in different training orders. for operating a simple device. The strong between-procedure transfer effects were predicted by a simple model of transfer in which individual production rules can be transferred or re-used in the representation of a new procedure if they had been used in a previously learned procedure. Apparently. this transfer mechanism acts on declarative propositional represen-tations of the production rules. suggesting that it is more similar to comprehension pro-cesses than to conventional practice mechanisms. or to Anderson's learning principle