In her article, “Mapping the Questions: The State of Writing-Related Transfer Research,” Jesse Moore highlights the major contributions of several scholars who have invested research into the study of transfer. Though the discussion of transfer is not yet widespread, as Moore points out, some working vocabulary and theory has been established to give current researchers a platform from which they can begin their study. Perkins and Salomon, Beach, Tuomi-Gröhn and Yrjö Engeström, Meyer and Land, and David Russell establish some of this platform. In their work, “Teaching for Transfer,” Perkins and Salomon define “high road” and “low road” transfer: “low road transfer relies on a new context triggering practiced habits to facilitate transfer, while high road transfer requires “mindful abstraction” of knowledge from one context to another” (Moore, 2012). These definitions, in particular, service the greater discussion of transfer theory by distinguishing between the absence and presence of mindfulness in the learner. Low road transfer is likely to occur when a learner is minimally aware of how he or she is repurposing already learned skills while high road transfer is likely to occur when a learner is able to articulate the difference in context between writing situations.
In contrast, Beach challenges the concept of transfer by proposing that the learner changes with the organization and therefore knowledge evolves from situation to situation—skills do not develop as the result of knowledge awareness, per say; but they do develop out of instinctual awareness of evolution.
Other scholars have taken an even different approach from that of Perkins, Salomon, and Beach, and in doing so, they have pivoted the discussion of transfer to look into the disciplines. For examples, Meyer and Land’s work on threshold concepts has pointed out that students can “identify with a discipline because the students begin to recognize the centrality of these concepts to the discipline” (Moore, 2012). In addition, Russell’s work on activity theory “describes school as an activity system with modified genres that are meaningful within that activity system but that do not adequately approximate the genres of professional activity systems” (Moore, 2012). In other words, students must be present in the situation in order to understand the activity and be active participants in it.
Beyond this, Moore also identifies several studies that focus on students’ transitions from first-year composition to other contexts, noting McCarthy as one of the first to inquire about such transitions. It seems that though McCarthy was not studying “transfer” in particular, her work that traces the transition of a student from one activity to another is foundational to the discussion. Writing-related transfer studies are not limited to first-year composition, of course, as other studies investigate the student transition from the classroom context to the professional context. Anson and Forsberg investigate this transition in internship settings while another scholar, Bacon, “inquires about students’ generalizations from writing in composition classes to writing for community-service agencies” (Moore, 2012). And still, other studies focus on genres in relation to transfer, including Wardle, Clark and Hernandez, Nowacek, and Rounsaville.
Moore, J. (2012). Mapping the questions: The state of writing-related transfer research. Composition Forum 26. N.p.