Transfer of Learning

From Low Transfer of Learning: The Glass Is Half Full by Bryan Caplan.

I love it when I find a whole new domain of knowledge that reveals to me research of which I was unaware but pertinent to my interests or needs. Wikipedia's description of the field of Transfer of Learning:

Transfer of learning is 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, similar context – or how "improvement in one mental function" could influence a related one. Their theory implied that transfer of learning depends on how similar the learning task and transfer tasks are, or where "identical elements are concerned in the influencing and influenced function", now known as the identical element theory.

So there is the theory of Transfer of Learning. What is the evidence? From Caplan.

Teachers like to think that no matter how useless their lessons appear, they are "teaching their students how to think." Under the heading of "Transfer of Learning," educational psychologists have spent over a century looking for evidence that this sort of learning actually occurs.

The results are decidedly negative. Learning is highly specific. One decent summary:

[T]ransfer is especially important to learning theory and educational practice because very often the kinds of transfer hoped for do not occur. The classic investigation of this was conducted by the renowned educational psychologist E. L. Thorndike in the first decades of the 20th century. Thorndike examined the proposition that studies of Latin disciplined the mind, preparing people for better performance in other subject matters. Comparing the performance in other academic subjects of students who had taken Latin with those who had not, Thorndike (1923) found no advantage of Latin studies whatsoever. In other experiments, Thorndike and Woodworth (1901) sought, and generally failed to find, positive impact of one sort of learning on another...

Thorndike's early and troubling findings have reemerged again and again in other investigations...

Most educational psychologists are dismayed by what they've discovered about Transfer of Learning. (Here's one eloquent example). After reviewing the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, though, I realized that researchers' moping is premature.

Read his post for his optimism.

I frequently see strong arguments made for Transfer of Learning in areas where I cannot find any actual evidence to support the hoped for conclusion.

One common claim is that reading literary fiction disposes a person to a more empathetic worldview and makes a person more effective. It is taken as an article of faith in many quarters. And, as far as I can tell, there is no credible evidence to support the supposition.

There isn't much attempted empirical research in the first place. Of the little that there is, most of it is purpose driven, i.e. they are setting out to prove that the effect is real rather than dispassionately seeking empirical evidence one way or the other.

There are a handful of studies, deeply flawed in design, and with too small non-random subject samples, which have found evidence for a very small effect size. In other words, the evidence suggests that reading literature does make one more empathetic but that the effect size is very small.

But among all the studies, the more rigorous the study design, the more random the sample, the larger the subject population, the more likely the result is null. There is no evidence to support an empathy development effect from reading literary fiction.

The second common claim I see is that such-and-such a program develops critical thinking. As with the empathy hypothesis, the evidence for effective Transfer of Learning in terms of critical thinking is miniscule.

The final area where I commonly see this faith in Transfer of Learning is in childhood literary circles. The faith is that if children read books with multicultural casts of characters, they will be more tolerant; if they read books with characters that "look" like them, they will be more confident; if they read books with more emotional content, they will be more empathetic.

The basis for believing any of these things is empirically true is de minimis.

And certainly, since my university days, there seems to have always been the background belief among people whom I know that universities were not a developmental interlude to cultivate deep knowledge but, rather, an opportunity to "learn how to learn." Were that it were so.

There seems to be little evidence supporting the idea of Transfer of Learning. Arum and Roksa seem to indicate that there is also little transfer of knowledge. Quite an opportunity for transformational change.