Transfer & Apply is an intentional way of prompting members of a class or audience to recognize ideas they have learned and consciously transfer them to applications in their own environment. Transference of learned material is recognized as one of the hardest cognitive achievements. A good (and expensive!) education can fall off like a poorly attached veneer if students don't practice thinking about how what they've learned applies to situations outside of the site where they learned it. The need for this practice fits every discipline and students of all ages and abilities!

One Chinese proverb goes something like, "Given a person a fish and he eats for a day; teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime." Without doubt, many principles of freshwater stream fishing can be applied (that is, they transfer) to deepwater ocean fishing. The number of people who do not readily see which ones and how is amazingly large.

If the theory or principle taught in class is complex, students may generate applications more successfully by working in pairs or small groups.

A professor can scan perhaps four Transfer & Apply assessment forms per minute to see whether students are grasping the theory or principles taught in class. Audiences with maturity and experience are particularly able to benefit from taking time to Transfer & Apply. Collecting their responses is not necessary.

----T.A. Angelo and K. P. Cross, 1993. Classroom Assessment Techniques, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass., p. 236-9.

Transfer & Apply

Please take a moment to recall ideas, techniques, strategies, and tactics we've discussed ---plus those you've thought up--- to this point in the session. Quickly list as many possible applications as you can. Don't filter or censor yourself; these are possibilities. You can always assess the practical nature and evaluate the desirability of these applications to your own classroom/lab/studio/home environment later.