Effects of Experiential Learning on Students’ Transfer Skills

Experiential learning is used extensively in agriculturally related colleges and courses. There is a need to examine how to best structure meaningful learning experiences in order to best prepare the agriculture, food, and natural resources workforce. This study aimed to investigate how different modes of reflection and levels of transfer affect the development of students’ transfer skills over time in an undergraduate animal science course. A 2 × 3 factorial, quasi-experimental design, examined with linear mixed modeling, was used to examine how the two treatment variables (reflection mode and transfer level) impacted students’ transfer skills (the dependent variable) over time. Time (in weeks) had a positive, significant effect on participants’ ( N = 123) transfer skill quiz scores. The fixed effect of near transfer had a negative, significant effect on participants’ transfer skills scores as compared to the fixed effect of far transfer. All remaining fixed effects had no significant effect on students’ transfer skills scores. As students spend more time practicing transfer skills, especially to distal contexts (i.e., far transfer), their ability to transfer abstract concepts increases. We recommend that educators who seek to teach for transfer implement intentional scaffolding in which learners progress across multiple levels of transfer context.