Definition
An educational principle in which skills, knowledge, or habits learned in one task carry over and influence performance on a related task. Positive transfer occurs when prior learning helps the new task; negative transfer occurs when prior learning interferes with it.
Plain English
What you learn in one situation can help you (or sometimes get in the way) when you try something similar later.
Context Anchor
Used in flight instruction, especially when a pilot moves to a different airplane, procedure, cockpit layout, or training task.
Derivation
Transfer comes from a Latin word meaning “to carry across.” That helps here because the idea is about carrying a learned habit, skill, or way of thinking from one training situation into another.
Why Pilots Care
Positive transfer reduces the amount of actual flight time needed to reach proficiency and lowers training costs while maintaining safety.
Intuition Check
Transfer of training does not mean moving a student from one school, instructor, or course to another. It means earlier learning carrying over into a new task, for better or worse.
Example Sentence 1
The instructor noted strong positive transfer of training from the student's simulator sessions to the actual aircraft.
Example Sentence 2
Negative transfer of training appeared when the pilot applied carbureted-engine procedures to a fuel-injected aircraft during the transition training.