What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research?
There are very few solved problems, which leaves just about everything else as an unsolved problem. The question that I am most interested in is how can you teach in ways that promote transfer. What kinds of learning experiences allow people to take what they have learned and apply it in situations? Transfer is a classic issue in psychology and in education, but I think that it is really the fundamental unsolved problem. We really want to know how to teach for transfer. I think that we know how to teach facts and procedures, what we don’t know is how to teach higher-level concepts and strategies. An agenda for research needs to include an educationally relevant theory of learning. What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied? We can all point to our own work. At this point in our research in learning we have decided that it does not make sense to have a general theory of learning and what we have are much more domain-sp
