Editorial: Understanding effective education: far transfer from a sociocultural and cognitive neural perspective

The papers in this Special Topic illustrate this mandate and show its potential to enhance education. They also suggest fruitful directions for research to explore the best ways for curricula to develop and sustain robust far transfer, whether at the molecular level of specific subject matter (e.g., Lai & Zhang, 2021;Mickey & McClelland, 2025), the molar level of general classroom instruction (seen in papers by Gamino et al., 2022, andDemetriou et al., 2022), or at the theoretical level of essential elements of developmental and cognitive processes (seen in papers by Demetriou et al., 2022, Sofologi et al., 2022, Don et al., 2023, and Mickey, Kreisel et al., 2025). Here we briefly summarize each contribution, then provide an overview of what we see as three integrating principles that emerge from these independent examples of effective education.At the level of curricular materials, Lai and Zhang (2021) show benefits of dysfluency and signaling in multimedia materials for science education, and Mickey and McClelland (2025) show benefits of providing spatial representations for trigonometric functions, both for retention and for transfer. (2022), andMickey, Kreisel, et al. (2025) all emphasize in different ways the importance of students' learning robust forms of relational discovery.A first principle, recognized in all the papers, is that creating effective education requires attending to multiple factors, including students' motivation, students' and teachers' beliefs about intelligence, the structure of curricular scaffolding, and the nature of classroom environments. That effective education requires attention to multiple factors is, as a general point, not a revelation for educators and educational researchers. What we think we add to this general point is a focus on specific factors that promote "far transfer" so that activities that engage students and teachers also lead them to apply their knowledge to new situations.A second principle is to help students think in a relational mode, such that they seek ways to relate one item of information to others in a meaningful way, whether by constructing arguments, adopting alternative perspectives or co-ordinating the relations among items in one context to relations among items in another context. One way to do this is through teaching skills of constructive argumentation that encourage taking alternative points of view; another way is to develop representational models that can generalize from one context to another.A third principle is to encourage flexibility of thought and the use of multiple pathways to solve a problem or reach a goal. Rather than seeking a single framework with which to solve a given type of problem, learners need to be encouraged to accept that there can be multiple paths to reach a goal. This principle is seen particularly clearly in the work of Mickey, Kreisel, et al. (2025), who make a strong case for students' use of both rules and the unit circle to solve trigonometry problems, for example. The importance of flexibility of representations has been noted before, as in Siegler's research (e.g., Siegler & Pyke, 2013) on the learning of fractions, but these papers reinforce that principle.One caveat, articulated clearly in our series of papers by Akindipe (2024), is that effective educational practices have to be judged not only by their impact on average performance by a class but also by their impact on individual students or groups of students. We note, for example, the recent analysis by Bouton, Yosef and Asterhan (2023) showing that educational techniques that work for most students are not effective for the weakest students without additional support.Nonetheless, we are encouraged about the possibilities of making education more effective and promoting far transfer by combining insights from cognitive/neural approaches and sociocultural approaches. Further, the successes reported by Garmine et al. (2022) andMickey, Kreisel et al. (2025) with implementations in actual classrooms demonstrate the approach is feasible. Combined with work like that of Bouton et al. (2023) and Reznitskaya and Wilkinson and their colleagues (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2013;Wilkinson, Reznitskaya, Bourdage, Oyler, Glina, & Drewry, Kim & Nelson, 2017) showing success in training teachers to provide effective education, these papers suggest that new paradigms for teacher training and new forms of classroom instruction will enable our students not only to learn effectively and durably but also to apply their learning beyond the classroom.