Transfer of Learning

Transfer of learning is the study of the dependency of human conduct, learning, or performance on prior experience. The notion was originally introduced as transfer of practice by Edward Thorndike and Robert S. Woodworth. They explored how individuals would transfer learning in one context to another context that shared similar characteristics – or more formally how "improvement in one mental function" could influence another related one. Their theory implied that transfer of learning depends on the proportion to which the learning task and the transfer task are similar, or where "identical elements are concerned in the influencing and influenced function", now known as identical element theory. Transfer research has since attracted much attention in numerous domains, producing a wealth of empirical findings and theoretical interpretations. However, there remains considerable controversy about how transfer of learning should be conceptualized and explained, what its probability occurrence is, what its relation is to learning in general, or whether it may be said to exist at all.

Most discussions of transfer to date can be developed from a common operational definition, describing it as the process and the effective extent to which past experiences (also referred to as the transfer source) affect learning and performance in a current novel situation (the transfer target) (Ellis, 1965; Woodworth, 1938). This, however, is usually where the general consensus between various research approaches ends.

Transfer taxonomies

Of the various attempts to delineate transfer, typological and taxonomic approaches belong to the more common ones (see, e.g., Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Butterfield, 1988; Detterman, 1993; Gagné, 1977; Reeves & Weisberg, 1994; Salomon & Perkins, 1989; Singley & Anderson, 1989). Taxonomies are concerned with distinguishing different types of transfer, and therefore less involved with labeling the actual vehicle of transfer, i.e., what is the