- How do people transfer skills and knowledge
from one situation to another?
- How can we teach for transfer?
- Conditions for transfer
– Teachers will understand what conditions are needed
for knowledge and skills learned in one context to be retrieved
and applied to a new situation.
- Teaching for transfer – Teachers
will develop ideas about how to facilitate transfer in their
own classrooms and how to build bridges for their students
between concepts, activities, and lessons.
- Transfer is the ability to extend what one
has learned in one context to new contexts. In some sense,
the whole point of school learning is to be able to transfer
what is learned to a wide variety of contexts outside of
- If the ultimate goal of schooling is to help
students transfer what they have learned in school to the
everyday settings of home, community, and work, we have
much to learn from the nonschool environments where people
work. Studies conducted in places like U.S. ships, hospital
emergency rooms, and dairy farms have found at least three
contrasts between schools and everyday settings:
- School environments place more emphasis on individual
work than most other environments, which tend to emphasize
- School work tends to involve more "mental work,"
whereas everyday settings invest more in tools and technologies
to solve problems.
- Abstract reasoning is emphasized in school, whereas
contextualized reasoning is used more often in everyday
- The overall implication of such studies is
that for effective transfer to take place, learning should
be organized around the kinds of authentic problems and
projects that are more often encountered in nonschool settings.
- Researchers have found that a number of factors influence
a learner's ability to understand or apply new knowledge:
- the nature of the initial learning experience
- the contexts for both the initial learning and the
new situation to which it may apply
- the ability of learners to see similarities and differences
- learners' metacognitive abilities to reflect on and
monitor their own learning
- For transfer to occur, learning must involve
more than simple memorization or applying a fixed set of
procedures. Learners must understand a concept or have command
of a skill in order to be able to use it themselves.
The Nature of the Initial Learning
- An important point about transfer is that
the initial knowledge that is intended for transfer needs
to be well-grounded.
Learning with understanding includes grappling with principles
and ideas, and structuring facts around these organizing
- Another factor that influences initial learning
is the time students
are given to explore ideas, offer predictions, process information,
and make sense of new tasks and situations.
- The way in which teachers organize ideas
and learning experiences
is a third factor that makes a difference in how deeply
- A fourth influence on initial learning is
affects the amount of time people are willing to put into
- Applying knowledge in real-life contexts
can support deeper initial learning. At the same time, knowledge
too closely tied to only one specific situation may not
transfer to others unless general principles for its use
are also understood.
Transferring Knowledge In and
Out of Different Contexts
- Students transfer knowledge into a
new learning situation, just as they transfer out
newly formed understandings to other settings.
- Teachers can build on the knowledge students
bring to the classroom by providing opportunities to discuss
what they already know about a topic, relating problems
to familiar contexts, and working with other teachers to
build curricula that build across grade levels.
- At the same time, teachers should be aware
of the many ways a student's prior experiences and understandings
may impede new learning.
- One kind of transfer occurs when we learn
the parts of a task and then use those parts to do something
much more complicated.
- Another kind of transfer occurs when we have
to take what we have learned in one situation and apply
it to a new situation at roughly the same level of complexity.
- We can transfer within a subject matter as
well as across subject matter areas.
- Encouraging the transfer of knowledge out
to new, more complex situations might involve asking students
to study a particular problem in the classroom and then
assigning a project that requires applying these understandings
outside the classroom.
Seeing Similarities and Differences
- Part of the challenge of transfer is knowing
when two situations share a fundamental structure and thus
should trigger the use of a previously learned concept or
principle. Jerome Bruner (1960) suggests that teachers can
help students use their knowledge across dissimilar situations
when they –
- provide a context for the subject matter
- capitalize on general principles
- encourage the understanding of structures that tie
subject matter knowledge together
Metacognition and Transfer
- Engaging learners in metacognitive activities
– helping them become more aware of how to focus on
critical ideas or features of problems, generate themes
or procedures, and evaluate their own progress – can
improve transfer and reduce the need for explicit prompting.
Two general metacognitive questions learners can ask themselves
to facilitate transfer are:
- "How is this problem like others I have solved
- Does anything here remind me of anything I have learned
earlier?" (Gage and Berliner, 1998, p. 301).
John Bransford and Daniel Schwartz propose
a conception of transfer that emphasizes individuals' preparation
for future learning and takes into account "assessments
of people's abilities to learn in knowledge-rich environments"
(Bransford & Schwartz, 1999, p.8). According to this view
of transfer, learning is a process –
- that takes place over time
- is influenced by learners' past experiences
and current dispositions
- can be shaped by feedback and
active self-monitoring of understanding
- and depends on access to resources
for continued learning
In other words, transfer in its most powerful
general form is the ability to apply a wide range of learning
strategies to new learning situations.
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Materials for Session 11