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"Science of learning" proponents often claim their proposals are more likely to be sound because they are grounded in the cognitive sciences. The truth is that they are committed to a very narrow set of cognitive theories, of which there are in fact many!

SoL folks are primarily cognitivists, with a dash of constructivism. They see the brain is a symbol-crunching machine best developed by repeated exposure to training. They agree that it is helpful if learners care about what they are learning, but mostly for motivation, a means to enable repetition.

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"Transfer" is the primary goal -- being able to take what you learn in one context and apply it in another. As I've said before, if this is the foundation of your theory, direct instruction, and "personalized" AI are natural pedagogical endpoints.

But we've come far since Piaget. Sociocultural theories of cognition recognize knowledge is tied to the body, as well as the social and physical environment. Learning emerges from interactions between the learner, tools, materials, others, and the culture (language, practices, norms) of the space.

Here "transfer" is the wrong metaphor entirely. We don't develop an abstraction in our minds that we carry around. Rather, we build concrete understanding, situated in the learned context and grounded in our bodies. This knowledge is "activated" when the conditions are right.

Activation means that learning is not about abstraction, but concretion -- of building many relationships with ideas and practices, getting to know them from a wide range of perspectives and experiences. Learning is about meaning, about connection, through both mind and body.