Evolving and Emerging Perspectives on the Transfer of Learning

Abstract

This chapter considers the phenomenon of transfer of learning in light of heightened concerns over power, privilege, equity, gender, and race in education. The authors argue that assumptions about transfer have a tremendous impact on education via classroom assessments and achievement tests and that discriminatory and racist practices in education are often produced and reproduced via inappropriate assessment and testing practices. The chapter is organized around four dimensions of assessments as they relate to transfer. These dimensions are format, level, function, and theory. The authors consider each dimension with a particular eye on contemporary “asset-based” responses to historical educational inequities. The authors consider how these dimensions are currently represented in research on culturally responsive educational practices (or not) and speculate about how these dimensions might be used to organize more culturally responsive assessment and testing. The authors specifically explore the synergies between two situative transfer mechanisms and several contemporary asset-based responses to historical inequities. They conclude by arguing that a situative multi-level approach to assessment and new models of research-practice partnership offers a coherent means of applying these synergies to educational practice.