For a profession to grow and develop, it is vitally important that scholars engage in constructive dialogue and debate the important issues in the field. For this reason, we greatly appreciate the thoughtful and insightful reactions to our article written by Newstrom and by Tang. It is exciting to be a part of this type of scholarly dialogue about transfer of learning. We feel certain that we all will benefit by continued discourse and collaboration of this type.
As we stated in our article, our core objective was to take an initial step toward the goal of a general transfer climate instrument with known psychometric properties. Both Newstrom and Tang reinforce that this study was an important first step but also agree that there are more steps to follow. Tang's description of the research stream validating the Job Descriptive Index UDI) is exactly the process we envision for transfer climate measurement. We readily acknowledge Newstrom's point that there are deficiencies (which we noted in our article) that prevent ours from being the last word. Like him, we feel that ours is a study that advances our understanding but needs to be built upon. In fact, we have several major studies under way at this moment to do just that (Bates, Holton, and Seyler, 1997). We greatly appreciate both authors' compliments on our work, as well as their vision for future work in this area.