Question

Write a paper (750‐1,000 words) that includes the following: The career opportunities in the discipline that have the most appeal based on research. New knowledge gained through the research. How the information influences your studies and future career.

Answer 1

Learning and Transfer

Processes of learning and the transfer of learning are central to understanding how people develop important competencies. Learning is important because no one is born with the ability to function competently as an adult in society. It is especially important to understand the kinds of learning experiences that lead to transfer, defined as the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts. Educators hope that students will transfer learning from one problem to another within a course, from one year in school to another, between school and home, and from school to workplace. Assumptions about transfer accompany the belief that it is better to broadly “educate” people than simply “train” them to perform particular tasks.

Measures of transfer play an important role in assessing the quality of people’s learning experiences. Different kinds of learning experiences can look equivalent when tests of learning focus solely on remembering (e.g., on the ability to repeat previously taught facts or procedures), but they can look quite different when tests of transfer are used. Some kinds of learning experiences result in effective memory but poor transfer; others produce effective memory plus positive transfer.

Key characteristics of learning and transfer that have important implications for education:

• Initial learning is necessary for transfer, and a considerable amount is known about the kinds of learning experiences that support transfer.

• Knowledge that is overly contextualized can reduce transfer; abstract representations of knowledge can help promote transfer.

• Transfer is best viewed as an active, dynamic process rather than a passive end-product of a particular set of learning experiences.

• All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn.

ELEMENTS THAT PROMOTE INITIAL LEARNING

The first factor that influences successful transfer is degree of mastery of the original subject. Without an adequate level of initial learning, transfer cannot be expected. This point seems obvious, but it is often overlooked.

OTHER FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE TRANSFER

Transfer is also affected by the context of original learning; people can learn in one context, yet fail to transfer to other contexts. For example, a group of Orange County homemakers did very well at making supermarket best-buy calculations despite doing poorly on equivalent school-like paper-and-pencil mathematics problems.

How tightly learning is tied to contexts depends on how the knowledge is acquired. Research has indicated that transfer across contexts is especially difficult when a subject is taught only in a single context rather than in multiple contexts. One frequently used teaching technique is to get learners to elaborate on the examples used during learning in order to facilitate retrieval at a later time. The practice, however, has the potential of actually making it more difficult to retrieve the lesson material in other contexts, because knowledge tends to be especially context-bound when learners elaborate the new material with details of the context in which the material is learned. When a subject is taught in multiple contexts, however, and includes examples that demonstrate wide application of what is being taught, people are more likely to abstract the relevant features of concepts and to develop a flexible representation of knowledge.

The problem of overly contextualized knowledge has been studied in instructional programs that use case-based and problem-based learning. In these programs, information is presented in a context of attempting to solve complex, realistic problems.

Problem Representations

Transfer is also enhanced by instruction that helps students represent problems at higher levels of abstraction. For example, students who create a specific business plan for a complex problem may not initially realize that their plan works well for “fixed-cost” situations but not for others. Helping students represent their solution strategies at a more general level can help them increase the probability of positive transfer and decrease the degree to which a previous solution strategy is used inappropriately (negative transfer).

Relationships Between Learning and Transfer Conditions

Transfer is always a function of relationships between what is learned and what is tested. Many theorists argue that the amount of transfer will be a function of the overlap between the original domain of learning and the novel one. Measuring overlap requires a theory of how knowledge is represented and conceptually mapped across domains.

Active Versus Passive Approaches to Transfer

It is important to view transfer as a dynamic process that requires learners to actively choose and evaluate strategies, consider resources, and receive feedback. This active view of transfer is different from more static views, which assume that transfer is adequately reflected by learners’ abilities to solve a set of transfer problems right after they have engaged in an initial learning task. These “one-shot” tests often seriously underestimate the amount of transfer that students display from one domain to another.

Transfer and Metacognition

Transfer can be improved by helping students become more aware of themselves as learners who actively monitor their learning strategies and resources and assess their readiness for particular tests and performances.

LEARNING AS TRANSFER FROM PREVIOUS EXPERIENCES

When people think about transfer, it is common to think first about learning something and then assessing the learner’s abilities to apply it to something else. But even the initial learning phase involves transfer because it is based on the knowledge that people bring to any learning situation.

Transfer and Cultural Practices

Prior knowledge is not simply the individual learning that students bring to the classroom, based on their personal and idiosyncratic experiences (e.g., some children will know many things because they have traveled widely or because their parents have particular kinds of jobs; some children may have suffered a traumatic experience). Prior knowledge is also not only a generic set of experiences attributable to developmental stages through which learners may have passed (i.e., believing that heaven is “up” or that milk comes from refrigerated cartons). Prior knowledge also includes the kind of knowledge that learners acquire because of their social roles, such as those connected with race, class, gender, and their culture and ethnic affiliations. This cultural knowledge can sometimes support and sometimes conflict with children’s learning in schools.