Building the Rung: How to Teach Transfer on Purpose

Part 2 of Missing Rung

Return to that chemistry class for a moment. They calculated density perfectly in the lab — mass over volume, scales and cylinders, every quiz a clean score. A week later a physics worksheet asked for the density of a block of wood, and they froze. Same formula. New room. They said they hadn’t learned it yet.

They had. The knowledge just couldn’t travel.

Post one called that the missing rung — the space between deep learning and transfer that most classrooms never build. This post builds it. Because here’s what the research keeps insisting on: transfer isn’t luck. It has mechanisms, and mechanisms can be taught.

David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon (1988) had a name for the opposite assumption — the belief that if you teach something well enough, students will carry it wherever it’s needed on their own. They called it the *Bo Peep* theory of teaching: leave the sheep alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them. The sheep don’t come home. The rung has to be built.

First, measure the distance

Before you build the rung, you need to know how far the carry is.

Susan Barnett and Stephen Ceci (2002) sort transfer by distance. **Near** transfer moves knowledge to a context that closely resembles where it was learned — same formula, different surface. **Far** transfer moves it into genuinely new territory — a different subject, a real-world problem, a question that doesn’t announce which tool it wants.

The chemistry class failed a *near* jump. Same formula, a worksheet instead of a lab bench. That’s the sobering part. If the near rung is missing, the far one was never within reach. Distance matters because it tells you how much support the carry needs — a short hop and a long leap are not built the same way.

Why it got stuck to the bench

Students learn the surface before they learn the structure.

Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak (1983) showed how stubborn this is. Learners bind new knowledge to the surface features of wherever they met it. The chemistry students learned density fused to scales, cylinders, and metal cubes. The worksheet stripped all of that away — wood instead of metal, paper instead of a lab, the words *weighs* and *takes up* instead of *mass* and *volume* — and the structure underneath, the relationship between mass and space, went invisible.

Four things stacked up against them:

– Formula isolation. Density lived in the lab, and only in the lab.
– Surface change. Physical objects became text on a page.
– Vocabulary shift. The worksheet never said *mass* or *volume.*
– No abstraction. No one had named the formula as a tool that works anywhere.

And here’s the finding that points straight at the fix: Gick and Holyoak (1983) found that handing students one worked example — even with the principle stated plainly — didn’t reliably produce transfer. Students had to abstract the pattern themselves, usually across more than one case. You can’t hand someone transfer. You build the conditions for them to construct it.

Two roads, two moves

Perkins and Salomon (1988) mapped two routes to transfer, and each one has a teacher move attached.

Low road — hugging. Make the practice look like the destination. Vary the surface while the structure holds steady. Don’t teach density only with metal cubes on a scale — teach it with wood, water, gas, and word problems in the same week. When the surface keeps shifting, the knowledge stops being welded to any single setup. Hugging is how you build *near* transfer: you close the gap by making practice resemble the places the knowledge has to go.

High road — bridging. Lift the principle off the example and name it as something portable. Density is a rate — an amount per unit of space. It has cousins everywhere. Miles per hour. Cost per ounce. People per square mile.* Then send students hunting for the pattern in places you didn’t teach. Bridging is how you build *far* transfer: you abstract the structure so it can travel to rooms you’ll never pre-teach.

Hug the surface. Bridge to the structure. That’s the rung.

And bridge from more than one case. Gick and Holyoak’s learners built the portable version of an idea when they compared two examples and named what was the same. One example teaches the instance. Two, held side by side, teach the pattern — and the pattern is the part that travels.

The test is a new room

Here’s the move that makes all of it visible, and it loops straight back to assessment.

A quiz in the same format you taught measures deep learning. It does not measure transfer. If the metal-cube students get metal-cube problems, a perfect score tells you nothing about whether the knowledge can leave the bench.

To assess transfer, change the room. New numbers. New material. New wording. A problem from a neighboring subject. If the knowledge survives the new context, it transferred. If it collapses, you’ve found the missing rung — and you found it on a Tuesday, not on the cumulative exam in May.

Transfer isn’t only the goal of rigor. It’s the most honest test of it.

Build the rung

The chemistry students never needed harder problems. They needed the formula unhooked from the lab bench — that’s hugging — and lifted into a principle with cousins all over the curriculum — that’s bridging. Two moves. Neither one is exotic. Both have to be planned, because neither happens on its own (Hattie & Donoghue, 2016).

Post one named the gap: deep learning isn’t the top of the ladder. This post built the rung above it. The work now is small and specific. Take one unit you teach well. Find the single context you always teach it in. Then ask the two questions that build transfer: *How can I vary the surface?* and *What is the principle underneath, and where else does it live?*

Answer those, and your students stop collecting knowledge that stays in the room. They start building knowledge that travels.

—

References

Barnett, S. M., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. *Psychological Bulletin, 128*(4), 612–637. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.4.612

Gick, M. L., & Holyoak, K. J. (1983). Schema induction and analogical transfer. *Cognitive Psychology, 15*(1), 1–38.

Hattie, J. A. C., & Donoghue, G. M. (2016). Learning strategies: A synthesis and conceptual model. *npj Science of Learning, 1,* Article 16013. https://doi.org/10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.13

Perkins, D. N., & Salomon, G. (1988). Teaching for transfer. *Educational Leadership, 46*(1), 22–32.

Disclosure: Hugging for Near Transfer Failure image by Gemeni Notebook