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.

There are a wide variety of viewpoints and theoretical frameworks apparent in the literature. For review purposes, these are categorized as follows:

• a taxonomical approach to transfer research that usually intends to categorize transfer into different types;
• an application domain-driven approach by focusing on developments and contributions of different disciplines that have traditionally been interested in transfer;
• the examination of the psychological scope of transfer models with respect to the psychological functions or faculties that are being regarded; and
• a concept-driven evaluation, which reveals underlying relationships and differences between theoretical and empirical traditions.