No matter our discipline, as teachers of writing, we share a common goal: equipping students with skills we hope will transfer to other contexts. Yet, a persistent concern has been troubling researchers for several decades (Wardle 2007 and Dively and Nelms 2007): that we tend to assume, rather than know, that transfer is actually occurring. 

While this problem is often discussed as a matter of program or curricula design, research has also yielded plenty of insights that can inform what we do in our classrooms. Here are a few things to keep in mind: 

• It’s hard for students to generalize skills across classes: if we look at things from the students’ perspective, transfer expects quite a lot of them. Students must first intuit which skills to “generalize” across classes, and then, how to transform skills to fit a new context. This is one reason why, as researchers have noted, students are more prone to “compartmentalize” writing skills (per class, per assignment, per instructor), rather than seeing their college writing development as connected and cumulative.
• We can design assignments with “purposeful recursion”: researchers suggest we make sure students experience “purposeful recursion” (Miles 2008), a useful concept borrowed from Educational Psychology. To make it more likely that transfer occurs for a certain skill, it should be repeated across assignments, in successively more complex challenges.
• Our language really matters: we already know–it’s the terms we use to talk about writing that students remember after our classes (Jarratt et al 2009). Researchers also ask us to ponder: what metaphors and terms do we use to describe transfer in different majors, after first year writing? (Baird and Dilger 2017) How do we emphasize—across the curriculum–that writing skills develop through a long, gradual process?
• Writing as participation, not just skills: from a more theoretical perspective, some argue we should think of learning to write as akin to learning to participate in a new community. Transfer occurs not just because students retain a certain set of skills, but also because they get better at discerning (over and over again!) what’s required of them in different contexts (Anson 2015).  How can assignments (especially at the upper division level) emphasize the goal of deeper participation, rather than just the “correct” execution of skills?