By: Cindy Wooldridge & Yana Weinstein

One of the critiques that we receive as cognitive psychologists is that testing encourages rote memorization, which is not the goal of most educators. We understand the critique; our goal is rarely to simply transmit raw facts to our students. Instead, we want our students to be able to use their knowledge to solve problems in the “real world”.

This application of knowledge and skills is called transfer by cognitive psychologists, and it is often considered a primary goal of education; and yet, it is extremely tricky to achieve. However, to the extent that it can be achieved at all, testing can help with this goal, too.

A helpful distinction can be made between near and far transfer. Transfer can be conceptualized as a continuum. If you are transferring information to something very similar, such as a question that asks about the same material but in a new and different way, we refer to that as near transfer. If instead we ask students to apply their information to solve a novel problem or explain a real-world scenario, that would be considered far transfer. Again, these are on a continuum, from very near to very far.