Description/Abstract: The issue of transfer from the arts to other subject disciplines has almost become a leitmotif of arts education - unhappily it has almost come to define what we do! Perhaps because the arts have lost ground in recent years, it has become almost axiomatic to claim their importance in learning to read, write and compute, or in learning other subjects. Advocates have been anxious to demonstrate that experiences in the arts can advance the general education of K-12 pupils, in particular through the development of higher order thinking skills. As our research team read through the accumulated literature we began to see that the value laden and somewhat strident claims often skewed research endeavors by coloring them with the needs of advocacy. Put directly, most studies of transfer in the 1980s and 1990s have been framed by a unidirectional and linear model of learning in which certain capacities engendered in the arts are thought to travel to other subject disciplines and to be "causal" in supporting enhanced learning.