ABSTRACT
To talk about transfer of students learning across contexts from high school to college or from college to work, for instance is to participate in a discussion about the purpose of school that has ranged for the past 150 years. Perhaps for this reason, it also is a feature of prominent educational reform efforts like the Common Core Standards, the subject of this analysis. These can include rhetorically-based concepts and 'asking students to engage in activities that foster the development of metacognitive awareness, including asking good questions about writing situations and developing heuristics for analyzing unfamiliar writing situations'. This is the fundamental argument associated with college and career readiness, a frame that has become so dominant in discussions of the purpose of education that to question it is anathema. Yet, the research on transfer indicates that it is the ability to analyze the specific expectations among different contexts for practice, whether academic disciplines or workplaces, that contributes to writers success.
