613).Īs Barnett and Ceci go on to ask, can a baker apply what was learned about fractions in school to an analysis of how to divide the ingredients for a recipe, and can a military recruit apply what they have learned from a textbook when in the field? These are all questions of transfer.Īs might already be clear, transfer applies to both skills and knowledge. Much of the financial and human investment in education has been justified on the grounds that formal schooling helps inculcate general skills that transfer beyond the world of academia and thus help students become more productive members of society. More broadly, it has been argued that the entire point of education is to develop capacities that people can use later: vocational skills specific to an occupation.

essential skills (which includes everything mentioned so far, so it’s hard to know why they needed another bullet point!).core skills (which apparently again include numeracy, as well as communication).The Building the Curriculum 4 policy paper notes that key among these are: Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, for example, suggests that schooling develops “ skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work”.

The most obvious example of this is the concept of ‘transferable skills’. Most curricula justify what they do in terms of what psychologists call transfer, that is to say, the extent to which what has been studied can later be used in other contexts.

Transferable skills and knowledge: Farewell to Bo Peep? In this reflection on the implications of research for educational practice, Jonathan Firth addresses three views of how and when learning can transfer to different contexts.

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