Transfer of Learning

Transfer of learning is the study of the conditions under which knowledge or a skill acquired in one context is applied by a learner in a different context, a foundational question in educational psychology dating to a well known 1901 study by Edward Thorndike and Robert Woodworth, who tested whether training on one mental task improved performance on another and found the improvement was far more limited than educators of their era assumed. Research in the field commonly distinguishes near transfer, applying a skill to a task very similar to the one it was learned in, from far transfer, applying it to a substantially different context, with far transfer consistently found to be much harder to achieve and to depend heavily on how explicitly a learner is taught to recognize the principle a task shares with the original learning situation. The concept underlies a basic justification for schooling itself, the assumption that skills learned in a classroom will transfer outside it, and it has driven research on how instruction can be designed to promote transfer deliberately, such as by teaching underlying principles rather than isolated procedures.