The Vital Role of Transfer in Education (Part 3)
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #116
Hello, and welcome (a little behind schedule!) to the third and final part of my deep dive into transfer.
This time I will focus on the ways to facilitate transfer in classrooms and other learning situations. If you missed the previous parts, you can catch up on them here and here.
And if you’re in a hurry, allow me to briefly sum up:
Transfer relates to the extent that learning experiences impact on future situations. Can what we learn today help us tomorrow?
Various research has suggested that the following can help with transfer: prior knowledge; metacognitive cues or awareness; understanding; varied practice.
These points suggest that we can and should design learning experiences with transfer in mind. After all, if what we cover in classes has no impact on future thoughts, skills, action or understanding, then what is the point in doing it at all?
Scenario
It might help to illustrate this issue with a scenario. I’m going to choose one that is familiar to me, but there are endless similar issues across different educational settings:
Kate has written many essays at high school, and has performed very well. Now, she is doing a university course in Education Studies. In this new subject, she is struggling to plan and write an effective essay.
Here we see a student who has learned skills and strategies that could transfer to a new context, but this is not automatic or straightforward.
Routes to transfer
As I discussed last time, there are many reasons that transfer might fail. These issues suggest that we need to ensure that basic knowledge and skills are well learned, and also, crucially, that we build understanding and metacognitive awareness, so that students know when they should and should not apply their prior learning.
Bransford & Schwartz (1999) identify a further key factor: “overly contextualized information can impede transfer because information is too tied to its original context.”
For Kate in the scenario above, her essay writing may be too closely associated with the subjects and requirements of her high school courses. She may have relevant writing skills, but these won’t automatically transfer when she gets to university and begins to study a new subject, as with the ‘armies’ problem I discussed last time.
Other challenges that we can consider are:
A problem may look different on the surface. Here, Kate might not realise that she has relevant knowledge and relevant writing (sub)skills.
There can be a lack of a bridge that smoothes the transfer from one context to another via intermediate steps. That is, the new task may be too different for transfer to be manageable for the learner.
There can be a lack of metacognitive awareness of particular strategies she used before, making it harder to apply them.
There may be some negative transfer (which I mentioned last week), where tasks that look similar are in fact different in critical ways. This is a bit like accidentally using salt instead of sugar. For example, Kate might try to use heuristics which are only relevant to her school exams.
Implications for educators
Okay—let’s get onto some of the things that educators can do to support transfer.
1. Building prior knowledge
Successful transfer won’t happen when previous relevant material/skills have been forgotten (or were never learned in the first place.) This issue is, of course, an argument for some of the effective, evidence-based strategies discussed before, including spacing out practice over time (see update #39). In Kate’s case, this would include the basics of English grammar and written composition.
2. Activating prior knowledge
Even well practiced knowledge and strategies will be harder to retrieve after a delay. In a new learning situation, we should assume that even with relevant prior knowledge in LTM, students won’t automatically make use of this. One possible solution is to activate the knowledge using starter tasks or similar preparatory activities such as quick quizzes, paired discussions, gap fill or categorisation games. These force students to revisit key ideas and skills before the main task.
3. Varied practice
Teaching that focuses on overlearning routine problems until they have been mastered can lead to the learning becoming strongly linked to the learning context. One way to tackle this is to vary the way that practice takes place, practising it in different contexts and formats (Bjork, 1994). Interleaved practice is one example (sets of problems where each one appears in an unpredictable) order. Other forms of variation include opportunities for using knowledge and skills in varied tasks, different subjects and outside of the classroom, etc.
4. Teaching for understanding
Effective teaching for transfer needs to include elements that explain the ‘why’ behind the knowledge or skill. Practising without this context harms transfer when the context changes.
Bransford et al. (2000) provide a useful example: learning facts about arteries, such as that they are thicker and more elastic than veins, would not easily transfer to a task such as designing an artificial artery. They conclude (p. 9):
Research on expertise in areas such as chess, history, science, and mathematics demonstrate that experts’ abilities to think and solve problems depend strongly on a rich body of knowledge [but] people who are knowledgeable about veins and arteries know more than the facts noted above: they also understand why veins and arteries have particular properties.
5. Metacognitive awareness
Both positive (useful) and negative (harmful) transfer can link to a student’s metacognitive awareness – the extent that they know what they know, and recognise when strategies are or are not relevant. A good example is how statistics students are taught to be cautious not to assume that correlations imply cause and effect. Raising awareness of pitfalls and explicitly labelling strategies – these things aid transfer.
6. Bridging
As mentioned above, transfer can be challenging because the target task is just too different from prior learning. This can be helped by bringing in intermediate steps. This is known as bridging (Perkins & Salomon, 1992). Doing so can be seen as a form of scaffolding, making it easier for students to achieve the educational goal.
I hope you can see how these strategies would be relevant in a range of educational situations.
For a student like Kate in the example above, some of it will depend on the preparation that she received prior to university – was essay writing at school taught soundly, in a varied way, with explicit labelling of strategies, etc. That is unavoidable. However, there are also things that an educator can do to link back to prior learning – activating it, probing for metacognitive knowledge, making links etc.
Have a great week!
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.