Conceptualisation of motor skill transfer in water safety education: A scoping review

The question of how well motor skills transfer between contexts and environments is critical for water safety education. In particular, it remains unclear to what extent learning aquatic skills in a swimming pool supports performance in more variable, open water environments. We explored how skill transfer has been conceptualised, manipulated, and measured within water safety research. We anticipated that the water safety literature would be broad, methodologically diverse, and multidisciplinary. A scoping review, following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines was conducted and 69 peer-reviewed articles met the inclusion criteria. Although all articles alluded to skill transfer, only 41% explicitly conceptualised the term, with many instead using related concepts such as learning effects or adaptation. The literature examined transfer across a variety of task and environmental contexts, often implying multiple dimensions of transfer; however, a shared definition of transfer is largely absent in the broader aquatic literature, and only 36% of studies measured the extent of transfer directly. These findings highlight substantial conceptual ambiguity and limited theoretical clarity surrounding skill transfer in water safety research. Informed by the reviewed literature, we propose a working definition of transfer in a water safety context as: The extent to which human behaviour can be adapted and learnt across different aquatic situations based on prior experiences, individual movement skills and the relative similarity between situations. We argue that future research should more deliberately manipulate and measure skill transfer to better understand how transferrable water safety skills can be developed to reduce drowning risk.