learning,
motivation
Transfer Of Learning And its Medium of Occurrence
Transfer of learning occurs when learning in one context or with one set of materials impacts on performance in another context or with other related materials. For example, learning to drive a car helps a person later to learn more quickly to drive a truck, learning mathematics prepares students to study physics, learning to get along with one’s sibling may prepare one for getting along better with others, and experience playing chess might even make one a better strategic thinker in politics r business. Transfer is a key concept in education and learning theory because most formal education aspires to transfer usually the context of learning differe markedly from the ultimate contexts of application. Consequently, the ends of education are not achieved unless transfer occurs. Transfer is all the more important in that it cannot be taken for granted.
In a sense, any learning requires a medium of transfer. To say that learning has occurred means that the person can display that learning later. Even if the later situation is very similar, there will be some contrasts-perhaps time of day or the physical setting. So no absolute time can be drawn between ordinary learning and transfer.
Transfer only becomes interesting as a psychological and educational phenomenon in situations where the transfer would not be thought of a ordinary learning. For example, a student may show certain grammar skill on the English test (ordinary learnin) but not in everyday speech (the hoped-for transfer).
Positive Versus Negative Transfer: Positive transfer occurs when learning in one context improves performance in some other context. For instance, speakers of one language find it easier to learn related than unrelated second languages. Negative transfer occurs when learning in one context impacts negatively on performance in another. For example, despite the generally positive transfer among the related languages, contrasts of pronunciation, vocabulary, abd syntax generate stumbling blocks. Learners commonly assimilate a new language’s phonetics to crude approximations in their native tongue and use word orders carried over from their native tongue.
While negative transfer is a real and often problematic phenomenon of learning, it is of much less concern to education than positive transfer. Negative transfer typically causes trouble only in the early stages of learning a new domain. With experience, learners correct for the effects of negative transfer. From the stand point of education in general, the primary concern is that desired positive transfers occur.
Near Versus Far Transfer: Near transfer refers to transfer between very similar contexts, as for instance when students taking an exam face a mix of problems of the same kinds that they have practiced separately in their homework, or when a garage mechanic repairs an engine in a new model of car, but with a design much the same as in prior models. Far transfer refers to transfer between context that, on appearance seem remote and alien to one another. For instance, a chess player might apply basic strategic principles such as “take control of the center” to investment practices, politics, or military campaign. It should be noted that “near” and “far” are intuitive notions that resist precise codification. They are useful in broadly characterizing some aspect of transfer but do not imply any strictly defined metric of “closeness”.
Prospects of Transfer
As noted earlier, transfer is especially important to learning theory and educational practice because very often the kinds of transfer hoped for do not occur. The classic investigation of thus was conducted by the renowned educational psychologist to E.L. Thorndike examined the proposition that studies of Latin disciplined the mind, preparing people for better performance in other subject matters. Comparing the performance in other academic subjects of students who had taken Latin with those who had not, Thorndike (1923) found no advantage of Latin studies whatsoever. In other experiments, Thorndike and Woodworth (1901) sought, and generally failed to find, positive impact of one sort of learning on another. Thorndike concluded that transfer depended on “identical elements” in two performances and that most performances were simply too different from one another for much transfer to be expected. In terms of rough near-far distinction, near transfer is much more likely than far transfer.
Thorndike’s early and troubling findings have reemerged again and again in other investigations. For instance, the advent of computer programming as a school subject matter stimulated the proposal that computer programming developed general problem solving skill, much as Latin was thought to cultivate mental discipline. Unfortunately, several experiments seeking a positive impact of learning to programme on problem solving and other aspects of thinking yielded negative results. (Pea and Kurland 1984, Salomon and Perkins 1987).
Another learning experience that might impact broadly on cognition in literacy, the mastery of reading and writing. Wide-ranging transfer might be expected from experience with the cognitive demands of reading and writing and the cognitive structures that text carries. However, Scribner and Cole (1981) reported a study of an African tribe, the Vai, with an indigenous form of writing not accompanied by schooling. Using a variety of general cognitive instrument, they found no differences between Vai who had mastered this script and others who had not. They argued that the impact of literacy depends on immersion in diverse activities surrounding literacy, not on acquisition of reading and writing perse. The way, in contrast with the many uses of literacy apparent in many cultures.
Transfer and Local Knowledge
As emphasized earlier, near transfer seens to have much better prospects than far transfer. Not only does this trend appear in the empirical findings, but it makes sense in terms of contemporary research on “expertise”. Since the 1970’s a number of investigators have built a case for the importance of “local knowledge” (with knowledge taken in a broad sense to include skills, concepts, propositions, etc). In areas as diverse as chess play physics problem solving, and medical diagnosis, expert performance has been shown to depend on a large knowledge base of rather specialized knowledge (Ericsson and Smith 1991). General cross-domain principles, it has been argued, play a rather weak role. In the same spirit, some investigators have urged that learning is highly situated, that is finely adapted to its context (Brown et al. 1989. Lave 1988).
Conditions of Transfer
Positive findings of transfer, near and far, suggest that whether transfer occurs is too bald a question. It can, but often does not. One needs to ask under what conditions transfer appears.
Thorough and Diverse Practice: In a classic study of the impact of literacy and education in Russia, Luria (1976) found major influence on a number of cognitive measures. His results concerned a population where reading and writing played multipleroles. The contrast between Luria’s and Scribner and Cole’s findings suggests that transfer may depend on extensive practice of the performance in question in a variety of context. This yields a flexible relatively authomatixed bundle of skills easily evoked in a new situations.
Explicit Abstraction: Transfer sometimes depends on whether learners have abstracted critical attributes of a situation. In one demonstration, Gick and Holyoak (1980, 1483) presented subjects with aproblem story that allowed a particular solution. From subjects that solved the problem, they elicited what the subject took to be the underlying principle. Then they presented the subjects with another analogous problem that invited a similar approach. Those subjects with the fullest and soundest summary of the principle for the first puzzle were most successful with the second. These and other results suggest that explicit abstractions of principles from a situation foster transfer.
Arousing Mindfulness: Mindfulness refer to a generalized state of alertness to the activities one is engaged in and to one’s surroundings, in contrast with a passive reative mode in which cognitions, behaviours, and other responses unfold authomatically and mindlessly (Langer 1989). More encompassing than explicit abstraction and active self-monitoring, mindfulness would foster both of these.
Using a metaphor or anology. Transfer is facilitated when new material is studies in light of previously learned material that serves as analogy or metaphor. Things known about the “old” domain of knowledge can now be transferred to a “hew” domain thereby making it better understood and learned. For example, students may initially understand the idea of an atom better by thinking of it as a small solar system, or how the heart works by thinking of it as a pump.
Mechanism of Transfer
Why do factors of the kind identified above encourage transfer? Answers to that question can best come from an examination of the mechanisms of transfer, the psychological paths by which transfer occurs.
Abstraction: It is still possible today to grant Thorndike point that identical elements underlie the phenomenon of transfer. However, research suggests that a more complex picture of how identical element figure in the process of transfer. An identity that mediatates transfer can sit at a very high level of abstraction. Phenomena such as the branching of arteries and that of electrical power metworks can ewvince the same deep principle (the need to deliver something to a region point by wires) and the something being carried (blood versus electricity). Such a degree of abstraction helps to account for far transfer, because highly abstract identical elements can appear in very different contexts.
Transfer by Affordances: Writing from the perspective of situated cognition, Greeno et al. (in press) argue that transfer need not depend on mental representation that apply top the learning and target situations. Rather, during initial learning, the learner may acquire an action shema responsive to the affordances-the action opportunities-of the learning situation. If the potential transfer situation presents similar affordances and the person recognizes them, the person may apply the same or a somewhat adapted action schema there. External or internal representations may or may not figure in the initial learning or the resulting action schema. High road and low road transfer. Salomon and Perkins (1989, Perkins and Salomon 1987) synthesized findings concerned with transfer by recognizing two distinct but related mechanisms, the “low road” and the “high road”. Low road transfer happens when stimulus conditions in the transfer context are sufficiently similar to those in a prior context of learning to trigger well-developed semi-automatic responses. In keeping with the view of Greent et al (in press), these responses need to be mediated by external or mental representations. A relatively reflexive process, low road transfer figures most often in near transfer. For example, when a person moving a household rent a small truck for the first time, the person finds that the familiar steeming wheel, shift, and other features evoke useful car-driving responses. During the car is almost authomatic, although in small ways a different task.
High road transfer, in contrast, depends on mindful abstraction from the context of learning or application and a deliberate search for connections: What is the general pattern? What is needed? What principles might apply? What is known that might help? Such transfer is not in general reflexive. It demands time for exploration and the investment of mental effort. It can easily accomplish far transfer, bridging between contexts as remote as arteries and electrical networks or strategies of chess play and politics. For instance, a person new to politics but familiar with chess might carry over the chess principle of control of the center, pondering what it would mean to control the political center.
In a particular episode of transfer, the two roads can work together-some connections can occur reflexively while others are sought out. But in principle the two mechanisms are distinct.
Teaching for Transfer
In many situations, transfer will indeed take care of itself-situations where the conditions of reflexive transfer are met more or less automatically, For example, instruction in reading normally involves extensive practice with diverse materials to the point of considerable automaticity. Moreover, when students face occasions of reading outside of school-newspapers, books, assembly directions, and so on-the printed page provides a blantant stimulus to evoke reading skills.
In contrast, in many other context of learning, the conditions for transfer are less propitious. For example, social studies are normally taught with the expectation that history will provide a lens through which to see contemporary events. Yet the instruction all too commonly does not include any actual practice in looking at currect events with a historical perspective. Nor are learners encouraged to reflect upon the eras they are studying and extract general widely applicable conclusions or even questions. In other words, the conventions of instruction work against both authomatic (low road) and mindful (high road) transfer.
Two broad instructional strategies to foster transfer are hugging and bridging (Perkins and Salomon 1988). Hugging exploits reflexive transfer. It recommends that instruction directly engage the learners in approximations to the performance desired. For example, a teacher might give student trial exams rather than just talking about exam technique, or a job counselor might engage students. The learning experience thus “huds” the target performance, maximizing likelihood later of automatic low road transfer.
Briding exploits the high road to transfer. In bridging, the instruction encourages the making of abstractions, searches for possible connections, mindfulness, and metacognition. For example, a teacher might as students to devise an exam strategy based on their past experience, a job counselor might ask student to reflect on their strong points and weak pointsd and make a plan to highlight the former and downplay the latter in an interview. The instruction thus would empnasize deliberate abstract interview, the teachers might do both. Instructions that incorporates the realistic experiential character of hugging and thoughtful analytic character of bridging seems most likely to yield rich transfer.
In a sense, any learning requires a medium of transfer. To say that learning has occurred means that the person can display that learning later. Even if the later situation is very similar, there will be some contrasts-perhaps time of day or the physical setting. So no absolute time can be drawn between ordinary learning and transfer.
Transfer only becomes interesting as a psychological and educational phenomenon in situations where the transfer would not be thought of a ordinary learning. For example, a student may show certain grammar skill on the English test (ordinary learnin) but not in everyday speech (the hoped-for transfer).
Positive Versus Negative Transfer: Positive transfer occurs when learning in one context improves performance in some other context. For instance, speakers of one language find it easier to learn related than unrelated second languages. Negative transfer occurs when learning in one context impacts negatively on performance in another. For example, despite the generally positive transfer among the related languages, contrasts of pronunciation, vocabulary, abd syntax generate stumbling blocks. Learners commonly assimilate a new language’s phonetics to crude approximations in their native tongue and use word orders carried over from their native tongue.
While negative transfer is a real and often problematic phenomenon of learning, it is of much less concern to education than positive transfer. Negative transfer typically causes trouble only in the early stages of learning a new domain. With experience, learners correct for the effects of negative transfer. From the stand point of education in general, the primary concern is that desired positive transfers occur.
Near Versus Far Transfer: Near transfer refers to transfer between very similar contexts, as for instance when students taking an exam face a mix of problems of the same kinds that they have practiced separately in their homework, or when a garage mechanic repairs an engine in a new model of car, but with a design much the same as in prior models. Far transfer refers to transfer between context that, on appearance seem remote and alien to one another. For instance, a chess player might apply basic strategic principles such as “take control of the center” to investment practices, politics, or military campaign. It should be noted that “near” and “far” are intuitive notions that resist precise codification. They are useful in broadly characterizing some aspect of transfer but do not imply any strictly defined metric of “closeness”.
Prospects of Transfer
As noted earlier, transfer is especially important to learning theory and educational practice because very often the kinds of transfer hoped for do not occur. The classic investigation of thus was conducted by the renowned educational psychologist to E.L. Thorndike examined the proposition that studies of Latin disciplined the mind, preparing people for better performance in other subject matters. Comparing the performance in other academic subjects of students who had taken Latin with those who had not, Thorndike (1923) found no advantage of Latin studies whatsoever. In other experiments, Thorndike and Woodworth (1901) sought, and generally failed to find, positive impact of one sort of learning on another. Thorndike concluded that transfer depended on “identical elements” in two performances and that most performances were simply too different from one another for much transfer to be expected. In terms of rough near-far distinction, near transfer is much more likely than far transfer.
Thorndike’s early and troubling findings have reemerged again and again in other investigations. For instance, the advent of computer programming as a school subject matter stimulated the proposal that computer programming developed general problem solving skill, much as Latin was thought to cultivate mental discipline. Unfortunately, several experiments seeking a positive impact of learning to programme on problem solving and other aspects of thinking yielded negative results. (Pea and Kurland 1984, Salomon and Perkins 1987).
Another learning experience that might impact broadly on cognition in literacy, the mastery of reading and writing. Wide-ranging transfer might be expected from experience with the cognitive demands of reading and writing and the cognitive structures that text carries. However, Scribner and Cole (1981) reported a study of an African tribe, the Vai, with an indigenous form of writing not accompanied by schooling. Using a variety of general cognitive instrument, they found no differences between Vai who had mastered this script and others who had not. They argued that the impact of literacy depends on immersion in diverse activities surrounding literacy, not on acquisition of reading and writing perse. The way, in contrast with the many uses of literacy apparent in many cultures.
Transfer and Local Knowledge
As emphasized earlier, near transfer seens to have much better prospects than far transfer. Not only does this trend appear in the empirical findings, but it makes sense in terms of contemporary research on “expertise”. Since the 1970’s a number of investigators have built a case for the importance of “local knowledge” (with knowledge taken in a broad sense to include skills, concepts, propositions, etc). In areas as diverse as chess play physics problem solving, and medical diagnosis, expert performance has been shown to depend on a large knowledge base of rather specialized knowledge (Ericsson and Smith 1991). General cross-domain principles, it has been argued, play a rather weak role. In the same spirit, some investigators have urged that learning is highly situated, that is finely adapted to its context (Brown et al. 1989. Lave 1988).
Conditions of Transfer
Positive findings of transfer, near and far, suggest that whether transfer occurs is too bald a question. It can, but often does not. One needs to ask under what conditions transfer appears.
Thorough and Diverse Practice: In a classic study of the impact of literacy and education in Russia, Luria (1976) found major influence on a number of cognitive measures. His results concerned a population where reading and writing played multipleroles. The contrast between Luria’s and Scribner and Cole’s findings suggests that transfer may depend on extensive practice of the performance in question in a variety of context. This yields a flexible relatively authomatixed bundle of skills easily evoked in a new situations.
Explicit Abstraction: Transfer sometimes depends on whether learners have abstracted critical attributes of a situation. In one demonstration, Gick and Holyoak (1980, 1483) presented subjects with aproblem story that allowed a particular solution. From subjects that solved the problem, they elicited what the subject took to be the underlying principle. Then they presented the subjects with another analogous problem that invited a similar approach. Those subjects with the fullest and soundest summary of the principle for the first puzzle were most successful with the second. These and other results suggest that explicit abstractions of principles from a situation foster transfer.
Arousing Mindfulness: Mindfulness refer to a generalized state of alertness to the activities one is engaged in and to one’s surroundings, in contrast with a passive reative mode in which cognitions, behaviours, and other responses unfold authomatically and mindlessly (Langer 1989). More encompassing than explicit abstraction and active self-monitoring, mindfulness would foster both of these.
Using a metaphor or anology. Transfer is facilitated when new material is studies in light of previously learned material that serves as analogy or metaphor. Things known about the “old” domain of knowledge can now be transferred to a “hew” domain thereby making it better understood and learned. For example, students may initially understand the idea of an atom better by thinking of it as a small solar system, or how the heart works by thinking of it as a pump.
Mechanism of Transfer
Why do factors of the kind identified above encourage transfer? Answers to that question can best come from an examination of the mechanisms of transfer, the psychological paths by which transfer occurs.
Abstraction: It is still possible today to grant Thorndike point that identical elements underlie the phenomenon of transfer. However, research suggests that a more complex picture of how identical element figure in the process of transfer. An identity that mediatates transfer can sit at a very high level of abstraction. Phenomena such as the branching of arteries and that of electrical power metworks can ewvince the same deep principle (the need to deliver something to a region point by wires) and the something being carried (blood versus electricity). Such a degree of abstraction helps to account for far transfer, because highly abstract identical elements can appear in very different contexts.
Transfer by Affordances: Writing from the perspective of situated cognition, Greeno et al. (in press) argue that transfer need not depend on mental representation that apply top the learning and target situations. Rather, during initial learning, the learner may acquire an action shema responsive to the affordances-the action opportunities-of the learning situation. If the potential transfer situation presents similar affordances and the person recognizes them, the person may apply the same or a somewhat adapted action schema there. External or internal representations may or may not figure in the initial learning or the resulting action schema. High road and low road transfer. Salomon and Perkins (1989, Perkins and Salomon 1987) synthesized findings concerned with transfer by recognizing two distinct but related mechanisms, the “low road” and the “high road”. Low road transfer happens when stimulus conditions in the transfer context are sufficiently similar to those in a prior context of learning to trigger well-developed semi-automatic responses. In keeping with the view of Greent et al (in press), these responses need to be mediated by external or mental representations. A relatively reflexive process, low road transfer figures most often in near transfer. For example, when a person moving a household rent a small truck for the first time, the person finds that the familiar steeming wheel, shift, and other features evoke useful car-driving responses. During the car is almost authomatic, although in small ways a different task.
High road transfer, in contrast, depends on mindful abstraction from the context of learning or application and a deliberate search for connections: What is the general pattern? What is needed? What principles might apply? What is known that might help? Such transfer is not in general reflexive. It demands time for exploration and the investment of mental effort. It can easily accomplish far transfer, bridging between contexts as remote as arteries and electrical networks or strategies of chess play and politics. For instance, a person new to politics but familiar with chess might carry over the chess principle of control of the center, pondering what it would mean to control the political center.
In a particular episode of transfer, the two roads can work together-some connections can occur reflexively while others are sought out. But in principle the two mechanisms are distinct.
Teaching for Transfer
In many situations, transfer will indeed take care of itself-situations where the conditions of reflexive transfer are met more or less automatically, For example, instruction in reading normally involves extensive practice with diverse materials to the point of considerable automaticity. Moreover, when students face occasions of reading outside of school-newspapers, books, assembly directions, and so on-the printed page provides a blantant stimulus to evoke reading skills.
In contrast, in many other context of learning, the conditions for transfer are less propitious. For example, social studies are normally taught with the expectation that history will provide a lens through which to see contemporary events. Yet the instruction all too commonly does not include any actual practice in looking at currect events with a historical perspective. Nor are learners encouraged to reflect upon the eras they are studying and extract general widely applicable conclusions or even questions. In other words, the conventions of instruction work against both authomatic (low road) and mindful (high road) transfer.
Two broad instructional strategies to foster transfer are hugging and bridging (Perkins and Salomon 1988). Hugging exploits reflexive transfer. It recommends that instruction directly engage the learners in approximations to the performance desired. For example, a teacher might give student trial exams rather than just talking about exam technique, or a job counselor might engage students. The learning experience thus “huds” the target performance, maximizing likelihood later of automatic low road transfer.
Briding exploits the high road to transfer. In bridging, the instruction encourages the making of abstractions, searches for possible connections, mindfulness, and metacognition. For example, a teacher might as students to devise an exam strategy based on their past experience, a job counselor might ask student to reflect on their strong points and weak pointsd and make a plan to highlight the former and downplay the latter in an interview. The instruction thus would empnasize deliberate abstract interview, the teachers might do both. Instructions that incorporates the realistic experiential character of hugging and thoughtful analytic character of bridging seems most likely to yield rich transfer.
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