Learning and Transfer

Shamsi Moussavi

Ravi Bhalla

Learning and Transfer

• Measures of transfer play an important role in assessing the quality of people’s learning experience

• Formal discipline

• Vertical transfer

• Near transfer

• Far transfer

Elements that Promote Initial Learning

• First factor is degree of mastery of the original subject

• Understanding versus memorizing– Can following a set of procedures help the

transfer?• Example: Programming students. It doesn’t help

their analytical skills that is important• Throwing darts (box 3.3)• Properties of arteries

Elements that Promote Initial Learning

• Time to learn– Amount of time is proportional to the amount

of material being learned• Chess masters require 50K to 100K hours of

practice and know 50K moves!

– Too many topics too quickly hinders subsequent transfer

• Summer session?

Elements that Promote Initial Learning

• Beyond “Time on task”– Engage in deliberate practice and monitor learning

• Making contrasts

• Motivation to learn– Ways to motivate

• Challenges– Should be at the right level

• Social opportunities– Students helping/explaining other students in programming labs

• Impact on others

Other Factors that Influence Transfer

• Context– Learn in one context, yet fail to transfer to other

context• Supermarket calculation vs school-like math

– Subject needs to be taught in multiple contexts• Can this be done in every discipline?

– Teach one case and ask students to do the same for another case

– Generalize the case• May be hard for students with weak analytical skills

• Problem representations– Ask students to present problems in higher level of

abstraction• Has the same problem as generalizing the case (above)

Other Factors that Influence Transfer

• Relationships between learning and transfer conditions– Transfer is a function of the overlap between the

original domain and the novel one• Teaching to use several text editors back to back

– But how about teaching physics and transferring the learned material to Bio?

• Active vs Passive approaches to transfer– Transfer should be a dynamic process

• Calculus facilitates learning physics, but not necessarily on the first day of the class

• Graduated prompting – Ask students: “Can you think of something you did earlier that

might be relevant?”

Other Factors that Influence Transfer

• Transfer and Metacognition– Helping students become more aware of their

knowledge, resources, and assessment– Engage learners as active participants in their

learning

Learning as Transfer from Previous Experiences

• All learning involves transfer from previous experiences

• Building on existing knowledge– Activate the prior and relevant knowledge that

the student may have• Children learning addition/subtraction formally after

they have done it in everyday play

Learning as Transfer from Previous Experiences

• Understanding conceptual change– One’s existing knowledge can make it difficult

to learn new information• Fish is fish

– Probe students’ preconceptions on the subject when teaching new explanations

• How plants get their food

– Make students’ thinking visible and help them re-conceptualize faulty conceptions

• “teaching by telling” can only be useful for certain conditions

Learning as Transfer from Previous Experiences

• Transfer and cultural practices– School failures may be because of mismatch

between school teaching and what the students have learned from their cultural/social environment

• “What is pumpkin pie?” and fractions

Transfer Between School and Everyday Life

• Goal is to help students transfer what they have learned to everyday settings of home, community, and workplace– Collaboration in everyday setting vs individual work in

school– Use of tools in everyday setting vs mental work in

school– Contextualized reasoning in everyday setting vs

abstract reasoning in school • Cottage cheese

– Could it be done with liquids?