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WPA-L November 2005 Part 2‹ WPA-L November 2005 part 1 | List of November Messages | WPA-L November 2005 part 3 › Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 14:45:26 −0500
From: Jerry Nelms Carolyn, I’ve found two excellent and quick reviews of the research on knowledge transfer: National Research Council, Committee on Developments in the Science of Learning (John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, eds.). HOW PEOPLE LEARN: BRAIN, MIND, EXPERIENCE, AND SCHOOL, Expanded Edition. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2000. See Chapter Two: How Experts Differ from Novices and Chapter Three: Learning and Transfer.
Schunk, Dale H. LEARNING THEORIES: AN EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE. 4th Ed. Columbus, OH: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2004. See the Critical Issues section of Chapter 1: Learning: Introduction, Issues, Historical Perspective and the section on Transfer in Chapter 5: Learning Processes.
I would also highly recommend two articles by David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon: “Teaching for Transfer,” Educational Leadership 46.1 (September 1998): 22–32; and “Transfer of Learning,” International Encyclopedia of Education. 2nd Ed. Oxford, England: Pergamon P, 1992. <http://learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinking/docs/traencyn.htm>. [… ] Knowledge transfer is definitely complex, but I don’t think we can say that it doesn’t exist. Schunk distinguishes between Behaviorist views of cognition and Cognitivist views of cognition. A behaviorist view of transfer requires an overlapping of features between the learning context and the target context for application. That overlapping of features makes transfer very difficult to achieve. And yet, experienced writers do transfer knowledge (strategies, schemata, skills) across contexts all the time. A cognitivist view of transfer suggests that the learner is “cued” (signaled) to the potential for transfer, but it takes a training of the mind to look for and recognize these cues. Cognitivists tend to focus on how knowledge is stored in memory, so how we learn something can determine the ease or difficulty we have in applying that knowledge to contexts other than the learning context. This has important ramifications for teaching composition that I simply haven’t got time to go into here. But Cognitivists would say, yes, transfer is possible. Perkins and Salomon argue for what they call “bridging”--that is, teaching students to look for the potential of transfer across contexts. Key to transfer, of course, is the generalizing of the knowledge beyond the learning context—that is, the recognition that what’s being learned is applicable beyond the situation in which it is being learned. From: Anne Beaufort
Subject: Re: Writing classes and transferability Two citations your colleague might find helpful- One, pessimistic, from David Smit’s book The End of Composition, 2004 S. Illinois Press (there’s a chapter on transfer issues) The other, more optimistic, from my book, Writing in the Real World: Making the Transition from School to Work, 1999 Teachers College Press, pp.179–189 ‹ WPA-L November 2005 part 1 | List of November Messages | WPA-L November 2005 part 3 › |