Teaching for transfer

Abstract

Students, after they leave our care, are called to solve the diverse problems of the world, so we should teach to increase transfer: the ability to apply fundamental principles to new problems and contexts. This ability is rare. The following pages are from a workshop for faculty on designing courses that promote transfer. I discuss two design principles: to name the transferable ideas and to illustrate them with examples from diverse subjects. The discussion uses dimensional reasoning as the example of a valuable transferable idea, illustrating it with three diverse examples.