E076 · Learning, literacy & numeracy
Difficulty applying learning in a different situation
What might be happening when a young person can demonstrate a skill or understanding in one situation but does not reliably use it when the people, materials, environment or problem change?
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Overview
Learning something in one context does not guarantee that it will automatically appear everywhere else.
A young person may successfully demonstrate a skill:
- with one adult
- in an intervention session
- using familiar materials
- in one classroom
- when prompted in a particular way
and appear unable to use it elsewhere.
This movement of learning across contexts is often described as transfer or generalisation.
Transfer is not simply remembering the original learning.
The young person must recognise that the new situation is sufficiently similar for the previous knowledge or strategy to be relevant, and then adapt what they know to the differences in the new situation.
That is a substantial cognitive act.
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What this might look like
A young person might:
- use a strategy successfully in an intervention session but not in class
- demonstrate a skill with one adult but not another
- complete a problem when it resembles the taught example but struggle when the surface features change
- follow a social strategy during practice but not recognise when it is useful in real interaction
- use a regulation approach when prompted but not initiate it elsewhere
- understand a mathematical method but not recognise a different-looking problem requiring the same principle
- follow a routine at school but struggle with a similar routine at home
- appear to have “forgotten everything” when the environment changes
- need explicit help identifying how earlier learning connects to a new situation.
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Developmental expression
At this stage
Early childhood
Young children's learning is often closely connected to the people, objects and situations in which it occurred. Adults naturally provide repeated experiences across different contexts.
Early childhood
Young children's learning is often closely connected to the people, objects and situations in which it occurred. Adults naturally provide repeated experiences across different contexts.
Middle childhood
School increasingly expects pupils to recognise that a skill learned in one lesson or subject may be useful somewhere else.
Early adolescence
Subjects become more specialised, making connections between apparently different contexts less visible even when underlying skills overlap.
Later adolescence
Independent learning, employment and adult life increasingly require young people to recognise when previously learned knowledge can solve a novel problem without somebody explicitly pointing out the connection.
Choose each stage to see how the presentation and surrounding expectations may change over time.
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Strengths and differences
A young person who finds transfer difficult may still:
- learn taught material very successfully
- perform precisely within familiar conditions
- develop deep expertise
- remember explicit rules
- master routines
- show excellent knowledge.
The difficulty may arise when they must answer:
“Is this new situation actually another version of something I already know?”
This distinction can prevent adults from repeatedly reteaching a skill the young person already possesses.
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Top tips for support
- Do not assume transfer will happen automatically.
- Practise important skills in more than one context.
- Vary examples gradually.
- Explicitly identify what is the same and what is different.
- Ask where else the strategy might be useful.
- Revisit learning with different people, materials and environments.
- Teach the underlying principle rather than only one procedure.
- Use prompts in the new context and fade them where helpful.
- Involve the adults and settings in which the skill genuinely needs to function.
- Measure whether an intervention changes everyday participation, not just performance within the intervention itself.
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Things needing careful planning
E076 may become one of the more important architectural entries in the Phoenix Encyclopaedia because it challenges a widespread educational assumption:
Teaching a skill successfully is not the same thing as changing everyday functioning.
Evidence across intervention research repeatedly shows stronger effects on tasks close to what was directly trained than on more distant outcomes.
For example, a meta-analysis of executive-function interventions in children found a meaningful near-transfer effect but no convincing evidence of far transfer to untrained executive-function components. (1)
A systematic review of discourse interventions similarly found more promising effects within or close to the treatment context than on more distant generalisation outcomes. (2)
This does not mean young people are incapable of generalising. A systematic review of early social-communication interventions for autistic children found evidence of at least some transfer across people, settings or activities in most included trials, while also finding considerable variability. (3)
The better conclusion is:
generalisation is an outcome to design for and examine, not something adults should simply assume.
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Practical support principles
Useful approaches include:
- practising across contexts
- using varied examples
- making underlying principles explicit
- comparing situations
- contextualising and recontextualising learning
- involving different adults
- using natural opportunities
- prompting use of the skill in the setting where it matters
- gradually reducing contextual support
- revisiting skills after delays
- evaluating real-world use.
From understanding to support
Phoenix Atlas connections
Often useful
- varied contextual practice
- explicit generalisation planning
- metacognitive approaches
- naturalistic intervention
- collaborative home–school practice
Worth considering
- coaching
- intervention delivered within authentic settings
- self-monitoring prompts
- implementation planning across adults and environments.
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Evidence and cautions
Transfer research cautions strongly against assuming that training one cognitive process will automatically improve broad, unrelated outcomes. Reviews of cognitive and executive-function training often find more reliable near-transfer than far-transfer effects. (1)
At the same time, transfer can be supported. Reviews suggest that practising across different contexts and stimuli, making connections explicit and embedding skills in authentic environments can increase the likelihood of generalisation. (3)
Phoenix should therefore resist two opposite errors:
“They did it once, so they can always do it.”
and
“They haven't done it here, so they never learned it.”
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Public evidence sources
- Academic discourse intervention and generalisation — systematic review.
- Generalisation in early social-communication interventions for autistic children — systematic review.
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Possible explanatory lenses
Relevant possibilities include:
- recognition of similarity between situations
- executive functioning
- cognitive flexibility
- working memory
- retrieval
- language
- contextual cueing
- anxiety
- environmental demand
- depth of underlying conceptual understanding
- amount and variety of practice.
About this entry’s source
Open Beta · read the evidence notes and limitations
Source status describes the underlying material. The current site edition is Open Beta; the evidence notes and limitations remain part of the entry.