>"If I ask one of these adult students a question involving negative numbers, and I phrase it in terms of money and debt, they answer it immediately. If I ask t

>"If I ask one of these adult students a question involving negative numbers, and I phrase it in terms of money and debt, they answer it immediately. If I ask them using just numbers, they have no clue." There's an even more extreme example with street kids in Brazil who had de facto knowledge of mathematics (they worked as peddlers) but weren't able to do the same thing they did during daily life in a school setting. I wouldn't say that concept transfer is a skill, however. The two things that come to my mind when I think of the issue of transfer are: the feeling of a student being hung up on a particular problem, anxiously waiting for a solution to come up to his mind; people who seemed to try to tackle lots of different problems from lots of different angles (Wheeler, Feynman). So it seems to me to be more constrained by openess to experience on one hand (the willingness to try and fail) and creativity (willingness to look for and propose solutions) on the other, both of which are more like inclinations than skills. https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_05.html https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_05.htm...