 It's a very important distinction between surface and deep learning. Surface learning is very much about the idea, the ideas, the content, the knowledge and the information. And the deep learning is when you relate or extend or transfer that knowledge. And certainly in many schools and many systems, there is both those two parts, the content and how we relate and extend that content are really critical. Look, the differences between surface and deep learning are really important. On the one hand, I don't want to imply that it's a straight, very sharp distinction between the two of them. On the other hand, you can see them as a graduation from having an idea, from having many ideas, and that's the surface part, and then relating those ideas and then extending the ideas. This is all based on a model developed by two Australians back in the 1970s, Kevin Collison and John Biggs. And they called this their solo taxonomy. And it very much relates to the complexity of learning. And probably the most important thing is that you need both. Certainly to have relationships between ideas, you have to have ideas. And this is partly why we can see them as a bit of a continuum. Have an idea, have many ideas, then you relate them and then you extend them. Now the issue is that as you start relating and extending ideas, they start to form a new idea. And then you're back to the surface part of the cycle again. So it's a continuing cycle. But certainly the argument is that in any form of learning, any form of teaching, it's really important to know where the student is at and the aim is to have plus one, go to the next level as much as you can. As you're starting to learn something for the first time, the appropriateness of surface learning comes to the fore. Like if you've never played golf, you've never driven a car, you've never played canasta then I would expect in the first few lessons that 90% plus of the lesson would probably be about surface learning. In fact driving a car is a good example. Whereas as a parent, we teach our kid about defensive driving and getting a sense of where they are in the car and making sure that they have anticipation. And at that moment all they care about is where the break is. They want to know the surface level. And so great teaching knows what to focus on. But after a while, surely it's important to move the proportion of surface from 90% say and start to relate ideas to make it to the deep side of the things, side of the equation. Here's the problem. When we do observations of classrooms, we do analysis of student work and we ask the question, what skills typically does a student need to do work in our schools? 90% plus all they need is surface level knowledge. Surely that's not right. Now notice what I didn't say. I didn't say what the teachers think. Because teachers always think it's deep learning. In fact one of the big mistakes we make is we go to deep learning sometimes far too quickly. And so it's a really important distinction to make as to find out where the student is in that cycle of surface to deep. And obviously the other one I want to add in there is part of the deep learning you want them to transfer to similar and to different tasks. Look when should learning shift from surface to deep? I'm not bad at searching literature. I'm struggling to find any article ever written that addresses that problem. And I think that's a really major issue for us. Now I don't want to imply that there was actually a moment when suddenly you should go from surface to deep. It's a continuum. In fact learning is very much a staccato. But certainly we should be aware as instructors about where the students are on that complexity of learning cycle from surface to deep. And certainly at some point we should be saying to the student stop learning more and start relating them. See my answer to this particular question is to look at the work you ask the student to do. Look at the assessment. Look at the particular task and say which part of it is surface and which is deep. In fact in all my own work I usually have at least two questions for every concept. A surface question and a deep question. So it's very clear to the student what I'm asking for and it's very clear to me. Students are very smart. They don't do what you ask them to do. They don't do what you tell them to do. They do what you think, what they think you think is valuable. And what is valuable is usually your assessments. So if you work backwards and construct your assignments, construct your tasks, and yeah as I say the easiest thing is to split them. Have a surface part and a deep part. Make it play into the student. That's what it is. Don't trick them. We need to know that you know the content. We need to know how you're going to relate the content. Then marking and scoring is a lot easier because you're going to have a surface and a deep component. And that's certainly what we see as the big distinction. Despite 150 years of study it's very hard to find evidence of how you teach transfer. But we would certainly argue from the work we've been doing in the Science of Learning Centre it is possible. And here's a very simple example. Let's say I teach you something and I want you to apply it to a new situation. Like you learn something in history about Australian history and I want you to apply it now to American history. Or I give you a maths problem and I want you to try another maths problem. Before you do the next problem, if you stop and ask the question, what are the similarities and differences between these two contexts then transfer can happen. The problem is many students learn something, then go to the next problem, start solving it using the same strategy that doesn't work. So I do think there's a lot we can learn about near and far transfer that's very important. But in this learning cycle of moving from surface to deep there is another kind of moderator. And that is when you first are exposed to something. I'm just going to introduce you to Surge today or to Distillation. I'm going to introduce you to a new period of Queensland history. Then when you first expose the strategies that work are quite different from the strategies at the next part when I ask you to consolidate. Remember we're humans of little brains. Most of us can only remember five plus or minus two things at any one time. And so in many senses we have to over-learn a lot of the surface knowledge. And this is why in mathematics for example, once you get the notion that nine lots of six are 54 memorize it, over-learn it. So you're not sitting there saying when someone asks you to do a problem, well what's nine times six? And those students who learn how to over-learn, really they can then move to the next phase. Like when we did the work with an older party many years ago looking at Asian students in Australia, particularly at university level, they spent a lot of time over-learning the surface level knowledge so they could then spend their time doing the relating and extending. So there is a lot to be asked about the strategies that matter at the different stages of surface and deep and I think it's really important that we include transfer in the equation.