Internal Publication
Editorial: Understanding effective education: far transfer from a sociocultural and cognitive neural perspective
Webb and Whitlow (2019) suggested that there was considerable promise for understanding how to promote effective education by bringing together two different approaches to learning. One approach was a cognitive approach, derived from controlled experimentation on processes of learning and memory; the other approach was a sociocultural approach, derived from observations of communities of practice and the enculturation of knowledge. Despite their many differences, both approaches had come to share a view of effective education as a process that empowered learners to apply and adapt the knowledge they acquire in formal educational settings to solve problems and deal with situations that could be very different from those they were explicitly taught. In the language of transfer of training, both approaches had converged on the goal of promoting “far transfer.” With that goal, research efforts from both approaches need to identify paradigms that reliably produce such transfer, determine what common features those paradigms have, and develop theories that incorporate these features to create practical guidelines for educational implementations.
The papers in this Special Topic illustrate this mandate and show its potential to enhance education.
Author: Whitlow J. W.
Co-author: Meier, Ines
Co-author: Webb, Paul | ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4118-8973
Institution: Nelson Mandela University | Centre: DIGI-FACE
Type: Editorial | English | Peer Reviewed
Subjects: Education
Published in: Frontiers in Psychology, EISSN 1664-1078 | Volume 16 :1769420
Publisher of document: Lausanne: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 29 January 2026 | Pages: 5
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1769420
Copyright: © 2026 Whitlow, Webb and Meier | License: Open Acess : Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY)
