Far Transfer

Getting students to apply what they’ve learned

I have a confession to make. It has taken me a long time to admit this, but I feel I must get this off my chest. For years, I have been riddled with guilt, so please excuse me as I take this time to profess my wrongdoing.

I have blamed the English teacher. When students neglected to indent paragraphs in my history class, I pointed my finger at the English teacher. Poorly written topic sentences? I accused the English teacher. Silly punctuation errors? I condemned the English teacher.

Then about seven years into my career, Karma knocked on my door and paid me a visit. I became the English teacher. Within a few months of that first school year teaching both English and history, I realized my transgression. It wasn’t the English teacher’s fault. I was the English teacher. Why was I reading poorly written paragraphs in history class when I could account for the lessons on paragraph writing in English? Why would my students apply punctuation and grammar rules to their writing in English, but fail to do so in history class? Was my instruction ineffective or were my students just lazy?

I spent the next several years reflecting on my teaching practice and improving instruction so that skills taught in English would transfer to other content areas, but I was still seeing the disconnect in their writing between the two subjects. I was pulling my hair out, prepared to surrender and chalk this up to student apathy. However, before waving my white flag, I brought it up to my colleagues in our monthly GMWP meeting. I soon discovered the missing puzzle piece: far transfer.

What is far transfer?

In a nutshell, far transfer is the brain’s ability to apply acquired knowledge in one discipline to others. Essentially, this is our goal as teachers. We want to prepare our students for life beyond our classroom by applying the skills learned in school to real life situations.

I came across the term, far transfer, in a column written by James M. Lang in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Lang shares research from two books written on the subject of transfer, How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan Ambrose and The Art of Changing the Brain: Enriching the Practice of Teaching by Exploring the Biology of Learning by James Zull. As teachers, we need to understand two fundamental things about transfer.

1. Transfer is not automatic. As the brain processes new information it creates or modifies neuronal networks. However, the brain builds from existing networks. Therefore, if a new skill is taught in English class, the brain will create a new pathway from an existing network that is closely related to that skill.
2. The more dissimilar the learning or the context, the less likely transfer will occur. Because the brain builds upon or modifies existing neuronal pathways, students don’t have the cognitive ability to immediately transfer a new skill to a novel context. The pathway hasn’t been built yet. Those pathways have to be created and it takes time and repetition to create those new networks in order for far transfer to occur.

How can I apply this new knowledge to the classroom?

This missing piece, far transfer, has shed new light on my teaching and instruction. In order for students to apply new skills to a variety of contexts beyond the disciplines I teach, I need to provide diverse experiences for them to practice these skills. Often in my English class, newly acquired skills are applied to a specific writing assessment rather than to a variety of contexts. As a result, students compartmentalize the skill and file it away for use in a similar situation. Therefore, as I reflect on and modify my instruction and assessment, I need to focus on linking the skill to contexts outside of English class. Additionally, I could be more intentional in coordinating the learning of a skill in English and then immediately applying this skill in history so that the students can begin the repetition and practice in multiple contexts.

In history, we work extensively on supporting a claim with appropriate evidence. This skill is essential to any discipline and serves students far beyond the walls of a classroom. However, in my experience it is one that they can replicate within one subject area, but are unable to apply to others. A few months ago, I was confounded after reading the editorials they wrote in English class. Many of my students were unable to substantiate their arguments with evidence. After so much practice with this in history class, they had failed to transfer the skill to English. I now realize that because the two contexts were so dissimilar, the brain had not created the pathway for far transfer to occur. As a result, I am becoming more intentional about using the same language in both classes and creating a variety of situations where students develop a claim and back it with evidence.

The concept of far transfer is essential for teachers as they look at their discipline in terms of cross-curricular connections. These connections between disciplines need to be authentic and replicated more than once so that students leave our classrooms with skills that they can apply to real world situations. After all, it is not just the English teacher’s responsibility to create those neural pathways, but other subject teachers need to be intentional in linking their content-area skills to English and other disciplines as well.