This chapter considers evaluation of student learning in a transformative classroom as assessing the degree of personal development: direct application, to near transfer, to transfer. Concurrent with these stages are three levels of emotional experience: memorable (emotional without insight), meaningful (emotion with insight), and transformative (emotion with insight, reflection, and change in behavior or attitude). These experiences can be positive or negative, with negative experiences being often found to be more formative. Examples are provided for teaching and testing on the basis of the intersection of these three levels of instruction and three levels of experience from an understanding of achievement, performance, and proficiency tests, along with the impact of testing on instruction – examples of both positive and negative impact of testing are given, and the case is made for aligning testing format and content with desired learning outcomes. Finally, a systematic flaw, of which testing is a part, in instructional system design that impairs formative assessment is pointed out, and suggestions are provided for integrating assessment into TLLT.

Inhibitory theory proposes three major functions that are required to control overactivation in response to cues in the environment and thought. Evidence suggests that each function, Access, Deletion, and Restraint, is reduced in efficiency in healthy older adults. These reductions can together account for slowing, reduced working memory capacity, and increased susceptibility to interference at retrieval – all memory phenomena associated with aging. These reductions also result in greater knowledge of the context in which events occur as well as in greater usage of that information. Opportunities for positive interventions tied to these inefficiencies are also noted.

Even healthy older people undergo some cognitive decline with real-world consequences, although the neural plasticity persisting in older brains indicates substrates for interventions. Yet there is no consensus on cognitive interventions. The literature on cognitive training is equivocal regarding the factors important in far transfer of training to untrained abilities. That there have been few hypotheses on mechanisms underlying far transfer of training is an obstacle to the design of cognitive interventions. We evaluate two hypotheses: (1) updating and (2) distraction suppression. (1) The updating hypothesis argues that updating and monitoring of working memory representations is an important mechanism of far transfer of training. Two meta-analyses of n-back training tasks found small, but significant, effect sizes in favor of transfer to fluid intelligence (Gf) in young and older people. However, direct tests of the updating hypothesis supported only narrow transfer effects. (2) The distraction suppression hypothesis argues that suppression of irrelevant events has a central role in cognitive processing. Perceptual discrimination training improved distraction suppression, enhanced neural activity associated with task-relevant targets, suppressed neural activity associated with task-irrelevant distractions, improved brain-stem evoked potential firing patterns and “speech-in-noise” perception, transferred to working memory, and reduced risk of dementia in a large-scale study. The evidence supports the conclusion that the strongest far transfer of cognitive training would be achieved by combined updating and distraction suppression training. Even small effect sizes of transfer to Gf can be beneficial to older people, consistent with the growing evidence for the role of lifestyle factors, including educational attainment, in risk of Alzheimer’s disease.