Stasz, C., & Brewer, D. J. (1999). Academic Skills at Work: Two Perspectives (MDS-1193). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.

The Issue of Skill Transfer

Educators and policymakers devote a lot of time deciding what to teach--what content and courses to include in formal education. It is generally accepted that mandatory schooling should impart some basic knowledge and skill that will serve as the foundation or building blocks for future learning in school and life. Basic skills are defined in various ways but usually refer to the three Rs--reading, `riting, and `rithmetic--and other academic disciplines. As mentioned earlier, high school graduation requirements emphasize basic academics, as do the various "back to basics" reforms. Recent studies attempt to define the basic academic skills that schools should teach to prepare students for the changing work world. Murnane and Levy (1996), for example, define the "new basic skills" or the minimum skills people now need to get a middle-class job. Their list includes "the ability to read at the ninth-grade level or higher" and "the ability to do math at the ninth-grade level or higher" (p. 32).

Whether the discussion is about old skills or new, basic or advanced, an implicit assumption is the notion that school learning (or at least some essential elements of it) transfers to other contexts. The idea that skills transfer from the context in which they are learned to a new situation follows logically within the positivist and human capital framework. Skills are discrete entities that a worker can acquire and, over time, they will increase the stock in that person's repertoire. The knowledge and skills students learn in high school should be useful in further schooling or be applicable in work situations. Therefore, if one knows what skills are required in work, the school should be able to design curricula to ensure that students acquire the proper building blocks.

Transfer has been cited as a justification for changing curricular content. Countless discussions of curriculum reform, led by educators and employers alike, argue that students need to learn new skills because work changes demand them. On the academic side, for example, researchers cite changes in work to justify the content of the mathematics curriculum (e.g., Murnane & Levy, 1996; Steen & Forman, 1995). On the vocational side, transfer is the rationale for broadening vocational education from specific job training to education in "all aspects of the industry." All these efforts assume some mapping between skills learned at school and their application on the job.

The transfer assumption is also evident in policies that require specific degrees or course taking in a relevant discipline in order to obtain a license or certification to practice a particular occupation. In the case of technical work, for example, the claim is made that effective technical practice relies heavily on theoretical or abstract knowledge, and technicians should therefore obtain degrees from postsecondary institutions in a relevant discipline (Barley & Orr, 1997). Theoretical, abstract, or "formal" knowledge is dispensed in school, and it is this "pure" knowledge that presumably transfers to non-school activities. Ethnographic research on work, however, suggests that formal knowledge typically plays a small role in what enables workers in many fields to successfully confront the ambiguities of practice (see Pinch, Collins, & Carboni, 1997; Scarselletta, 1997).

Many studies, largely from the situated perspective, raise serious questions about transfer. These studies suggest that simple one-to-one transfer does not happen very often or identify basic differences between formal knowledge and knowledge as applied in context which make simple notions of transfer hard to rationalize (Lave, 1988; Rogoff & Lave, 1984; Scribner, 1984, 1988). Vygotsky (1978), for example, pointed out that physical objects instrumental to the tasks that individuals accomplish in a given context, over time, become part of a person's mental operations. Scribner's studies of mathematics at work illustrate his point. In her study of dairy workers, for example, Scribner (1984) documented multiple ways in which these workers used knowledge of milk case size and physical space to make their work more efficient. They did few calculations that are recognizably arithmetic--as defined by school mathematics--but got reliable results by treating the material they worked with as part of their calculation. This line of research complicates the question of what is transferred because the abstract, formal operations in mathematics are mediated by the instrumental physical objects of the environment (e.g., the milk case) (Alterman, Wolf, & Carpenter, 1998).

Carraher and his colleagues (Carraher, 1991; Carraher, Schliemann, & Carraher, 1988) provide other evidence that practical and formal knowledge may be substantially different. In a study of Brazilian children who worked as street vendors, for example, the researchers found differences in the children's success at solving similar mathematics problems presented in different ways. While children solved 98% of problems given in the street setting, their success rate dropped to 34% when the same problem was presented as a computation (e.g., How much is 35 times 10?). Further studies show that given a choice, children are more successful at solving problems in their head (which they termed "oral maths") than solving them with "written maths," algorithms learned in school. These studies of cognitive mathematics outside of the school setting show that even unschooled children and adults routinely perform mathematics calculations at work, in naturally occurring situations.

Although these studies do not negate the value of mathematical algorithms, they raise questions about the viability of the "mathematical toolbox" which students develop in school then carry with them in life outside school, in the home, and in the factory (Dowling, 1991). More generally, these studies call into question the premise that any academic learning in school will be transferred directly to the workplace (Darrah, 1992).

Stasz, C., & Brewer, D. J. (1999). Academic Skills at Work: Two Perspectives (MDS-1193). Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education, University of California.