This study examined how learning a problem-solving strategy or schema in one or two distinct content areas with copying or explaining of the strategy affected students' ability to transfer that strategy to a new content area. Eighty-one regular and 56 honors junior high school students (grades 6 and 7) were presented with story problems and their solutions in one or two content areas. Students also completed plan worksheets in which they copied or explained the underlying strategy. In a transfer task, students were asked to solve a new story problem and to complete a questionnaire about metacognitive strategy use. They were then given a hint to use the previously learned story problems and a second chance to solve the problem. Copying or explaining the strategy had no effect on subsequent transfer. For regular students, exposure to a strategy in two content areas significantly enhanced pre-hint, but not post-hint, performance. Two-content honors students performed better on the post-hint task than did one-content students, but there were no differences in pre-hint transfer. Honors students reported more metacognitive strategy use. A direct relationship was found between transfer and metacognitive scores, with higher-performing students reporting more metacognitive strategy use. Plan worksheets and the questionnaire are appended. (Contains 32 references, 1 figure, and 2 tables.) (SLD)