Far transfer is when knowledge or skill learned in one context applies effectively in a new domain or a problem you have never seen before. It is the holy grail of education and the default failure mode of narrow training.
Why it is hard
Luria's premodern villagers could not apply logic to novel hypotheticals (white bears in Novaya Zemlya) even when they could reason about familiar cotton crops. College students trained in one discipline rarely generalize methods to another — Flynn's cross-disciplinary reasoning test exposed that. Math students who master procedures without structure cannot transfer when problems change surface form.
How to build it
- desirable-difficulties: interleaving, generation, making-connections problems
- analogical-thinking: especially distant structural analogies
- Breadth before depth: more learning contexts → more abstract models
- Abstract reasoning tools: Fermi estimation, statistical literacy, scientific spectacles
Kind-environment chunking (chunking) produces local transfer inside one domain; wicked worlds need typing the problem before matching strategy (kind-vs-wicked-learning-environments).