Research suggests that creative abilities, especially in design settings, may relate to the capacity to transfer ideas, concepts, and characteristics from one item to another. For example, many inventions and innovations have resulted from the creative processes involved in transfer. The capacity to recognize, dissect, and transfer in the context of design is not an automatic process amongst students and students may, or may not, see readily available opportunities to utilize transfer while designing creatively. Efforts were made to investigate student near/far transfer skills in the context of a design classroom for 9th graders (14-15 years old). Specifically, this National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored research centered on students engaged in Learning by Evaluating (LbE) – an activity in which students view pairs of items (e.g., pictures, design journals, etc.) related to their design task and choose which of the items is better based on a pre-determined criterion. While students were completing these comparisons, we intentionally provided them with items to compare that represented both near and far transfer opportunities for their design task. Student comments related to each comparison were collected and these provided the basis for our preliminary analysis and results.