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479 matches found for How People Learn Brain,Mind,Experience,and School Expanded Edition. in 3 Learning and Transfer

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... Learning and Transfer...
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... contexts (e.g., Byrnes, 1996:74). 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 &...
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... 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 ... 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....
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... Thorndike and his colleagues were among the first to use transfer tests to examine assumptions about learning (e.g., Thorndike and Woodworth, 1901). One of their goals was to test the doctrine of “formal discipline” that was prevalent at the turn of the century. ... to this doctrine, practice by learning Latin and other difficult subjects had broad-based effects, such as developing general skills of learning and attention. But these studies raised serious questions about the fruitfulness of designing educational experiences based on the assumption of formal ...
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... Early research on the transfer of learning was guided by theories that emphasized the similarity between conditions of learning and conditions of transfer. Thorndike (1913), for example, hypothesized that the degree of transfer between initial and later learning depends upon the ...
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... BOX 3.1 What People Learn...
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...; information into meaningful groups. The student had extensive knowledge about winning times for famous track races, including the times of national and world records. For example 941003591992100 could be chunked into 94100 (9.41 seconds for 100 yards). 3591 (3 minutes, 59.1 seconds for a mile), etc. ... it took the student a huge amount of practice before he could perform at his final level, and when he was tested with letter strings, he was back to remembering about seven items....
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... such an account, skills of writing letters of the alphabet are useful to writing words (vertical transfer). The theory posited that transfer from one school task and a highly similar task (near transfer), and from school subjects to nonschool settings (far transfer), could be facilitated by teaching ... and skills in school subjects that have elements identical to activities encountered in the transfer context (Klausmeier, 1985). Transfer could also be negative in the ...
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... of any learner characteristics, including when attention was directed, whether relevant principles were extrapolated, problem solving, or creativity and motivation. The primary emphasis was on drill and practice. Modern theories of learning and transfer retain the emphasis on practice, but they ... the kinds of practice that are important and take learner characteristics (e.g., existing knowledge and strategies) into account (e.g., Singley and Anderson, 1989)....
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... In the discussion below we explore key characteristics of learning and transfer that have important implications for education:...
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... Initial learning is necessary for transfer, and a considerable amount is known about the kinds of learning experiences that support transfer....
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... Transfer is best viewed as an active, dynamic process rather than a passive end-product of a particular set of learning experiences....
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... All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning, and this fact has important implications for the design of instruction that helps students learn....
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... ELEMENTS THAT PROMOTE INITIAL LEARNING...
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... 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....
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... in the computer language LOGO. The hypothesis was that students who learned LOGO would transfer this knowledge to other areas that required thinking and problem solving (Papert, 1980). Yet in many cases, the studies found no differences on transfer tests between students who had been taught LOGO and ... who had not (see Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1996;...
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... Luchins and Luchins (1970) studied how prior experience can limit people’s abilities to function efficiently in new settings. They used water jar problems ... participants had three jars of varying sizes and an unlimited water supply and were asked to obtain a required amount of water. Everyone received a practice problem. People in the experimental group then received five problems ( ... 2–6) prior to critical test problems (7, 8, 10, and 11). People in the control group went straight from the practice problems to problems 7–11. Problems 2–6 were designed to establish a &...
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... SOURCE: Adapted from Luchins and Luchins (1970)....
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... Mayer, 1988). However, many of these studies failed to assess the degree to which LOGO was learned in the first place (see Klahr and Carver, 1988; Littlefield et al., 1988). When initial learning was assessed, it was found that students often had not learned enough about LOGO to ... a basis for transfer. Subsequent studies began to pay more attention to student learning, and they did find transfer to related tasks (Klahr and Carver, 1988; Littlefield et al., 1988). Other research studies have shown that additional qualities of initial learning affect transfer and are ...
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... Understanding Versus Memorizing...
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... Transfer is affected by the degree to which people learn with understanding rather than merely memorize sets of facts or follow a fixed set of procedures; see Boxes 3.3 and 3.4....
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... In Chapter 1, the advantages of learning with understanding were illus-...
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... In one of the most famous early studies comparing the effects of “learning a procedure” with “learning with understanding,” two groups of children practiced throwing darts at a target underwater (Scholckow and Judd, described in Judd, 1908; see a conceptual ... by Hendrickson and Schroeder, 1941). One group received an explanation of refraction of light, which causes the apparent location of the target to be deceptive. The ...
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... trated with an example from biology that involved learning about the physical properties of veins and arteries. We noted that the ability to remember properties of veins and arteries (e.g., that arteries are thicker than veins, more elastic, and carry ... from the heart) is not the same as understanding why they have particular properties. The ability to understand becomes important for transfer problems, such as: “Imagine trying to design an artificial artery. Would it have to be elastic? Why or why not?& ... ; Students who only memorize facts have little basis for approaching this kind of problem-solving task (Bransford and Stein, 1993; Bransford et al., 1983). The act of organizing facts about veins and arteries around more general principles such as “how ...
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... Time to Learn...
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... reach that level of expertise; they rely on a knowledge base containing some 50,000 familiar chess patterns to guide their selection of moves (Chase and Simon, 1973; Simon and Chase, 1973). Much of this time involves the development of pattern recognition skills that support the fluent identification ...
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... Understanding Method...
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... The understanding method encouraged students to see the structural relations in the parallelogram, for example, that the parallelogram could be rearranged into a ...
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... In the rote method, students were taught to drop a perpendicular and then apply the memorized solution formula....
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... Both groups performed well on typical problems asking for the area of parallelograms; however, only the understanding group could transfer to novel problems, such as finding the area of the figures below....
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... or distinguishing between solvable and unsolvable problems such as...
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... BOX 3.5 Learning Algebra...
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... Students taking regular algebra in a major school system received an average of 65 hours of instruction and homework during the year. In contrast, those taking honors algebra received approximately ...
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... expertise occurs only with major investments of time, and the amount of time it takes to learn material is roughly proportional to the amount of material being learned (Singley and Anderson, 1989); see Box 3....
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... Learners, especially in school settings, are often faced with tasks that do not have apparent meaning or logic (Klausmeier, 1985). It can be difficult for them to learn with ...
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... Providing students with time to learn also includes providing enough time for them to process information. Pezdek and Miceli (1982) found that on one particular task, it took 3rd graders 15 seconds to integrate pictorial and verbal information; when given only 8 ...
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... It is clear that different ways of using one’s time have different effects on learning and transfer. A considerable amount is known about variables that affect learning. For example, learning is most effective when people engage...
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... BOX3.6 Preparation for Learning with Understanding...
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... Three different groups of college students received different kinds of instruction about schema theory and memory and then completed a transfer task where they were asked to make detailed predictions about the results of a new memory study. Students in Group 1 read ... summarized a text on the topic of schema theory and then listened to a lecture designed to help them organize their knowledge and learn with understanding. Group 2 did not read the text but, instead, actively compared simplified data sets from schema experiments on memory and then heard the same ... with the data sets but did not receive the organizing lecture. On the transfer test, students in Group 2 performed much better than those in Groups 1 and 3. Their work with the data sets set the stage for them to learn from the lecture. The lecture was necessary, as indicated by the poor performance of ...
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... practice” that includes active monitoring of one’s learning experiences (Ericsson et al., 1993). Monitoring involves attempts to seek and use feedback about one’s progress. Feedback has long been identified as important for successful learning (see, e.g., Thorndike, 1913), but it ... not be regarded as a unidimensional concept. For example, feedback that signals progress in memorizing facts and formulas is different from feedback that signals the state of the students’ understanding (Chi et al., 1989, 1994). In addition, as noted in ... 2, students need feedback about the degree to which they know when, where, and how to use the knowledge they are learning. By inadvertently relying on clues—such as which chapter in a text...
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... Understanding when, where, and why to use new knowledge can be enhanced through the use of “contrasting cases,” a concept from the field of perceptual learning (see, e. ... ., Gagné and Gibson, 1947; Garner, 1974; Gibson and Gibson, 1955). Appropriately arranged contrasts can help people notice new features that previously escaped their attention and learn which features ... clearer when contrasted with nonlinear functions; the concept of recognition memory becomes clearer when contrasted with measures such as free recall and cued recall....
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... of studies converge on the conclusion that transfer is enhanced by helping students see potential transfer implications of what they are learning (Anderson et al., 1996). In one of the studies on learning LOGO programming (Klahr and Carver, 1988), the goal was to help students learn to generate & ... for others to follow. The researchers first conducted a careful task analysis of the important skills underlying the ability to program in LOGO and focused especially on LOGO debugging skills—the process by which children find and correct errors in their programs. Part of the researchers& ... identified the four key aspects of debugging a program as identifying the buggy behavior, representing the program, locating the bug in the program, and then correcting the bug. They highlighted these key abstract steps and signaled to the students that the steps would be relevant to the transfer task ... have approached this task by memorizing the procedures for programming LOGO routines to “make a house,” “make a polygon,” and so forth. Simply memorizing the procedures, however, would not be expected to help students accomplish the transfer task of generating clear, bug-...
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... Motivation to Learn...
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... Motivation affects the amount of time that people are willing to devote to learning. Humans are motivated to develop competence and to solve problems; they have, as White (1959) put it, “competence motivation.” Although extrinsic rewards and punishments clearly affect ...
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... Challenges, however, must be at the proper level of difficulty in order to be and to remain motivating: tasks that are too easy become boring; tasks that are too difficult cause frustration. In addition, learners’ tendencies ... of an individual but, instead, varies across disciplines (e.g., a person may be performance oriented in mathematics but learning oriented in science and social studies or vice versa)....
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...). For example, young learners are highly motivated to write stories and draw pictures that they can share with others. First graders in an inner-city school were so highly motivated to write books to be shared with others that the teachers had to make a rule: “No leaving recess early to go back to ...
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... that has an impact on others—especially their local community (McCombs, 1996; Pintrich and Schunk, 1996). Sixth graders in an inner-city school were asked to explain the highlights of their previous year in fifth grade to an anonymous interviewer, who asked them to describe anything that made ... to make presentations to outside audiences, designing blueprints for playhouses that were to be built by professionals and then donated to preschool programs, and learning to work effectively in groups. Many of the activities mentioned by the students had involved a great deal of hard work on ...
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.... 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 (Lave, 1988). Similarly, some Brazilian street children could perform mathematics when making sales in the ... but were unable to answer similar problems presented in a school context (Carraher, 1986; Carraher et al, 1985)....
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... that transfer across contexts is especially difficult when a subject is taught only in a single context rather than in multiple contexts (Bjork and Richardson-Klavhen, 1989). One frequently used teaching technique is to get learners to elaborate on the examples used during learning in order to ... the new material with details of the context in which the material is learned (Eich, 1985). 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 ... develop a flexible representation of knowledge (Gick and Holyoak, 1983)....
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... 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 (e.g., Barrows, ... ; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1997; Gragg, 1940; Hmelo, 1995; Williams, 1992). For example, fifth- and sixth-grade students may learn mathematical concepts of distance-rate-time in the context of solving a complex case involving planning for a boat ... . The findings indicate that if students learn only in this context, they often fail to transfer flexibly to new situations (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1997). The issue is how to promote wide transfer of the learning....
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... One way to deal with lack of flexibility is to ask learners to solve a specific case and then provide them with an additional, similar case; the goal is to help them abstract general principles that lead to more flexible transfer (Gick ... Holyoak, 1983); see Box 3.7. A second way to improve flexibility is to let students learn in a specific context and then help them engage in “what-if” problem solving designed to increase the flexibility of their understanding. They might be asked: &...
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... were changed, or this part?” (Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1997). A third way is to generalize the case so that learners are asked to create a solution that applies not simply to a single problem, but ... are asked to adopt the goal of learning to “work smart” by creating mathematical models that characterize a variety of travel problems and using these models to create tools, ranging from simple tables and graphs to computer programs. Under these conditions, transfer to novel problems is ...
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... 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)....
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... have been studied in the context of algebra word problems involving mixtures. Some students were trained with pictures of the mixtures and other students were trained with abstract tabular representations that highlighted the underlying mathematical relationships (Singley and Anderson, ...
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... Relationships Between Learning and Transfer Conditions...
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... 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 ... one. Measuring overlap requires a theory of how knowledge is represented and conceptually mapped across domains. Examples of research...
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... College students were presented with the following passage about a general and a fortress (Gick and Holyoak, 1980:309)....
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... is therefore impossible. The general’s solution is to divide his army into small groups, send each group to the head of a different road, and have the groups converge simultaneously on the fortress....
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... Students memorized the information in the passage and were then asked to try another task, which was to solve the following problem (Gick and Holyoak, 1980:307– 308)....
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... the tumor is destroyed the patient will die. There is a kind of ray that may be used to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once and with sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed, but surrounding tissue may be damaged as well. At lower intensities the rays are ... to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?...
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... their own devices. However, over 90 percent were able to solve the tumor problem when they were explicitly told to use information about the general and the fortress to help them. These students perceived the analogy between dividing the troops into small units and using a number of small-dose rays ...
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... studies on conceptual representation include Brown (1986), Bassok and Holyoak (1989a, b), and Singley and Anderson (1989). Whether students will transfer across domains—such as distance formulas from physics to formally equivalent biological growth ... ;depends on whether they conceive of the growth as occurring continuously (successful transfer) or in discrete steps (unsuccessful transfer) (Bassok and Olseth, 1995)....
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... Singley and Anderson (1989) argue that transfer between tasks is a function of the degree to which the tasks share cognitive elements. This hypothesis was also put ... very early in the development of research on transfer of identical elements, mentioned previously (Thorndike and Woodworth, 1901; Woodworth, 1938), but it was hard to test experimentally until there was a way to identify task components. In addition, modern ... include cognitive representations and strategies as “elements” that vary across tasks (Singley and Anderson, 1989)....
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... Singley and Anderson taught students several text editors, one after another, and sought to predict transfer, defined as the savings in time of learning a new editor when it was not taught first. They found that students learned ... text editors more rapidly and that the number of procedural elements shared by two text editors predicted the amount of this transfer. In fact, there was large transfer across ... that were very different in surface structures but that had common abstract structures. Singley and Anderson also found that similar principles govern transfer of mathematical competence across multiple domains when they considered transfer of ...
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... A study by Biederman and Shiffrar (1987) is a striking example of the benefits of abstract instruction. They studied a task that is typically difficult to learn in apprentice- ... roles: how to examine day-old chicks to determine their sex. Biederman and Shiffrar found that twenty minutes of instruction on abstract principles helped the novices improve considerably (see also Anderson et al., 1996). ... for the benefits of helping students represent their experiences at levels of abstraction that transcend the specificity of particular contexts and examples (National Research Council, 1994). Examples include algebra (Singley and Anderson, 1989), computer language tasks (Klahr and Carver, 1988), ... skills (e.g., dart throwing, Judd, 1908), analogical reasoning (Gick and Holyoak, 1983), and visual learning (e.g., sexing chicks, Biederman and Shiffrar, 1987)....
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... representations do not remain as isolated instances of events but become components of larger, related events, schemata (Holyoak, 1984; Novick and Holyoak, 1991). Knowledge representations are built up through many opportunities for observing similarities and differences across diverse events. ...
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... of a general schema for the solved problems that can be applied to subsequent problems” (National Research Council, 1994:43). Memory retrieval and transfer are promoted by schemata because they derive from a broader scope of related instances than single learning experiences....
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... 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& ... . These “one-shot” tests often seriously underestimate the amount of transfer that students display from one domain to another (Bransford and Schwartz, 1999; Brown et al, 1983; Bruer, 1993)....
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... than a static perspective. Researchers have found much greater transfer to a second text editor on the second day of transfer than the first (Singley and Anderson, 1989): this finding suggests that transfer should be viewed as increased speed in learning a new domain—not simply initial ...
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... without a need for prompting. Sometimes, however, prompting is necessary. With prompting, transfer can improve quite dramatically (e.g., Gick and Holyoak, 1980; Perfetto et al., 1983). “The amount of transfer depends on where attention is directed during learning or at transfer” (...
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... students’ learning has prepared them for transfer is to use methods of dynamic assessment, such as “graduated prompting” (Campione and Brown, 1987; Newman et al, 1989). This method can be used to assess the amount of help needed for transfer by counting the number and types of ... learners need prompts that are much more specific. Tests of transfer that use graduated prompting provide more fine-grained analysis of learning and its effects on transfer than simple one-shot assessments of whether or not transfer occurs....
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... Transfer and Metacognition...
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... 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. We briefly discussed the concept of metacognition in Chapters 1 and 3 ( ... the need for explicit prompting. The following examples illustrate research on teaching metacognitive skills across domains of reading, writing, and mathematics....
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... Reciprocal teaching to increase reading comprehension (Palincsar and Brown, 1984) is designed to help students acquire specific knowledge and also to learn a set of strategies for explicating, elaborating, and monitoring the understanding necessary for independent learning. The three major ... of reciprocal teaching are instruction and practice with strategies that enable students to monitor their understanding; provision, initially by a teacher, of an expert model of metacognitive processes; and a social setting that enables joint negotiation for ... learn in working on a specific text are not acquired as abstract memorized procedures, but as skills instrumental in achieving subject-area knowledge and understanding. The instructional procedure is reciprocal in the sense that a teacher and a group of students take turns in leading the group to ... and use strategies for comprehending and remembering text content....
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... The method prompts learners to adopt the metacognitive activities embedded in sophisticated writing strategies. The prompts help learners think about and reflect on the activities by getting them to identify goals, generate new ideas, improve and elaborate existing ideas, and strive for idea cohesion. ... in the procedural facilitation program take turns presenting their ideas to the group and detailing how they use prompts in planning to write. The teacher also models these procedures. Thus, the program involves modeling, scaffolding, and ...
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..., to some extent, from the problem-solving heuristics of Polya (1957). Schoenfeld’s program adopts methods similar to reciprocal teaching and procedural facilitation. He teaches and demonstrates control or managerial strategies and makes explicit such processes as generating alternative ... of action, evaluating which course one will be able to carry out and whether it can be managed in the time available, and assessing one’s progress. Again,...
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... elements of modeling, coaching, and scaffolding, as well as collective problem solving and whole-class and small group discussions, are used. Gradually, students come to ask self-regulatory questions themselves as the teacher fades out. At the end of each ... the problem-solving sessions, students and teacher alternate in characterizing major themes by analyzing what they did and why. The recapitulations highlight the generalizable features of the critical decisions and actions and focus on strategic levels rather than on the ... solutions (see also White and Frederickson, 1998)....
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... An emphasis on metacognition can enhance many programs that use new technologies to introduce students to the inquiry methods and other tools that are used by professionals in the workplace (see Chapter 8). The important role of metacognition for learning has been demonstrated ... the context of a “thinker tools” program that lets students run simulations of physics experiments (White and Frederickson, 1998), as well as in adding a metacognitive component to a computer program designed to help college students learn biology. The value ... using video to model important metacognitive learning procedures has also been shown to help learners analyze and reflect on models (Bielaczyc et al., 1995). All of these strategies engage learners as active participants in their learning by focusing their ... on critical elements, encouraging abstraction of common themes or procedures (principles), and evaluating their own progress toward understanding....
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... LEARNING AS TRANSFER FROM PREVIOUS EXPERIENCES...
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... new information because of previous knowledge they use to construct new understandings. Third, students may have difficulty with particular school teaching practices that conflict with practices in their community. This section discusses these three implications....
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... BOX 3.8 Everyday and Formal Math...
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... The importance of building on previous experiences is relevant for adults as well as children. A mathematics instructor describes his realization of his mother’s knowledge (Fasheh, 1990:21&...
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... Math was necessary for my mother in a much more sense than it was for me. Unable to read or write, my mother routinely took rectangles of fabric and, with few measurements and no patterns, cut them and turned them into perfectly fitted clothing for people…I realized that the mathematics she ... using was beyond my comprehension. Moreover, although mathematics was a subject matter that I studied and taught, for her it was basic to the operation of her understanding. What she was doing was math in the sense that it embodied order, pattern, ... , and measurement. It was math because she was breaking a whole into smaller parts and constructing a new whole out of most of the pieces, a new whole that had its own style, shape, size, and that had to fit a specific person. Mistakes ...
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... knowledge. Would the mother’s learning of formal mathematics be enhanced if it were connected to this knowledge? The literature on learning and transfer suggests that this is an important question to pursue....
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... knowledge illustrates the benefits of helping students draw on relevant knowledge that can serve as a source of transfer. By the time children begin school, most have built a considerable knowledge store relevant to arithmetic. They have experiences of adding and subtracting numbers of items in their ... play, although they lack the symbolic representations of addition and subtraction that are taught in school. If children’s knowledge is tapped and built on as teachers attempt to teach them the formal operations of addition and subtraction, it is ... taught them as isolated abstractions. Without specific guidance from teachers, students may fail to connect everyday knowledge to subjects taught in school....
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... Understanding Conceptual Change...
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... will seem incomprehensible to students, but this feeling of confusion can at least let them identify the existence of a problem (see, e.g., Bransford and Johnson, 1972; Dooling and Lachman, 1971). A more problematic situation occurs when people construct a coherent (for them) representation of ... while deeply misunderstanding the new information. Under these conditions, the learner doesn’t realize that he or she is failing to understand. Two examples of this phenomenon are in Chapter 1: Fish Is Fish (Lionni, 1970), where the fish listens to the frog’s descriptions of people and ... its own idiosyncratic images, and attempts to help children learn that the earth is spherical (Vosniadou and Brewer, 1989). Children’s interpretations of the new information are much different than what adults intend....
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... The Fish Is Fish scenario is relevant to many additional attempts to help students learn new information. For example, when high school or college physics students are asked to identify the forces being exerted on a ball that is thrown vertically up in the air after it leaves the hand,...
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... existing knowledge can make it difficult to understand new information. A study of how plants make food was conducted with students from elementary school through college. It probed understanding of the role of soil and photosynthesis in plant growth and of the primary source of food in green plants (...
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... for students’ preconceptions on the subject, will leave many students with incorrect understanding (for a review of studies, see Mestre, 1994)....
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... concepts in mathematics guide students’ attention and thinking (Gelman, 1967; we discuss this more in Chapter 4). Most children bring to their school mathematics lessons the idea that numbers are grounded in the counting principles (and related rules of addition and subtraction). This knowledge ... well during the early years of schooling. However, once students are introduced to rational numbers, their assumptions about mathematics can hurt their abilities to learn....
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... learning about fractions. The mathematical principles underlying the numberhood of fractions are not consistent with the principles of counting and children’s ideas that numbers are sets of things that are counted and addition involves “putting together” two sets. One cannot ... 1/2. Neither the nonverbal nor the verbal counting principle maps to a tripartite symbolic representations of fractions—two cardinal numbers X and Y separated by a line. Related mapping problems have been noted by others (e.g., Behr et al., 1992; Fishbein et al., 1985; Silver et al., 1993). ... , early knowledge of numbers has the potential to serve as a barrier to learning about fractions— and for many learners it does....
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... The fact that learners construct new understandings based on their current knowledge highlights some of the dangers in “teaching by telling.” Lectures and other forms of direct ... can sometimes be very useful, but only under the right conditions (Schwartz and Bransford, 1998). Often, students construct understandings like those noted above. To counteract these problems, teachers must strive to make students’ thinking visible and find ways to help them ... faulty conceptions. (Strategies for such teaching are discussed in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7.)...
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... Transfer and Cultural Practices...
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... 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 ...
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...–1998; Rogoff, 1990, 1998; Saxe, 1990). This cultural knowledge can sometimes support and sometimes conflict with children’s learning in schools (Greenfield and Suzuki, 1998); see Box 3.9....
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... School failure may be partly explained by the mismatch between what students have learned in their home cultures and what is required of them in school (see Allen and Boykin, 1992; Au and Jordan, 1981; Boykin and Tom, 1985; Erickson and Mohatt, 1982). Everyday family habits and rituals can either be ... or ignored in schools, and they can produce different responses from teachers (Heath, 1983). For example, if young learners are never asked questions at home that seem ...
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... BOX 3.9 Eating Pie and Learning Fractions...
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... Even small differences in cultural knowledge have the potential to affect students’ learning. For example, a primary school teacher is helping students to understand fractional parts by using what she thinks is a commonplace reference. “Today, we’re going to ...
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... preoccupied with trying to imagine pumpkin pie: What does it taste like? How does it smell? Is its texture chunky like apple or cherry pie? In the mind of a child, all of these questions can become more of the focus than the subject of fractions that the teacher is attempting to teach....
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... of language (“Isn’t that a pretty toy? Doesn’t it make you feel happy?”). The language that children bring with them to school involves a broad set of skills rooted in the early context of adult-child interactions. What happens when the adults, peers, and contexts change (...
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... In contrast, white children use a more linear narrative style that more closely approximates the linear expository style of writing and speaking that schools teach (see Gee, 1989; Taylor and Lee, 1987; Cazden et al., 1985; Lee and Slaughter-Defoe, 1995). Judgments may be made by white and black teachers ... student; black teachers are more likely to positively evaluate the topic-associative style (Cazden, 1988:17). African American children who come to school speaking in a topic-associative style may be seen by many teachers as having less potential for learning. Teachers can be helped to view different ...
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... TRANSFER BETWEEN SCHOOL AND EVERYDAY LIFE...
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... for a wide set of purposes—that the learning will in some way transfer to other circumstances. In this sense, then, the ultimate goal of schooling is to help students transfer what they have learned in school to everyday settings of home, community, and workplace. Since transfer between tasks ... a function of the similarity by transfer tasks and learning experiences, an important strategy for enhancing transfer from schools to other settings may be to better understand the nonschool environments in which students must function. Since these environments change rapidly, ...
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... The question of how people function in a number of practical settings has been examined by many scientists, including cognitive anthropologists,...
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... sociologists, and psychologists (e.g., Lave, 1988; Rogoff, 1990). One major contrast between everyday settings and school environments is that the latter place much more emphasis on individual work than most other environments (Resnick, 1987). A study of navigation on U....
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... A second major contrast between schools and everyday settings is the heavy use of tools to solve problems in everyday settings, compared with “mental work” in school settings ( ... error free (e.g., Cohen, 1983; Schliemann and Acioly, 1989; Simon, 1972; see also Norman, 1993). New technologies make it possible for students in schools to use tools very much like those used by professionals in workplaces (see Chapter 8). Proficiency with relevant tools may provide a way to enhance ...
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... A third contrast between schools and everyday environments is that abstract reasoning is often emphasized in school, whereas contextualized reasoning is often used in everyday settings (Resnick, 1987). Reasoning can be improved when abstract logical arguments are ... of two-thirds of a cup of cottage cheese to create a dish he was cooking. He did not attempt to multiply the fractions as students would do in a school context. Instead, he measured two-thirds of a cup of cottage cheese, removed that amount from the measuring cup and then patted the cheese into a ... use knowledge, such as the size of milk cases, to make their computational work more efficient (Scribner, 1984); grocery store shoppers use nonschool mathematics under standard supermarket and simulated conditions (Lave, 1988); see Box 3.11....
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... How can you get 3/4 of 2/3 cup of cottage cheese?...
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... School Mathematics Strategy...
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... Pour out contents and form a circle....
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... Take away one part and use the rest....
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... bunces and costs 2...
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... as B and contains more...
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... many appealing strengths to the idea that learning should be organized around authentic problems and projects that are frequently encountered in nonschool settings: in John Dewey’s vision, “School should be less about preparation for life and more like life itself.” The use of problem- ... learning in medical schools is an excellent example of the benefits of looking at what people need to do once they graduate and then crafting educational experiences that best ... them for these competencies (Barrows, 1985). Opportunities to engage in problem-based learning during the first year of medical school lead to a greater ability to diagnose and understand medical problems than do opportunities to learn in typical lecture-based medical courses (Hmelo, ... ). Attempts to make schooling more relevant to the subsequent workplace have also guided the use of case-based learning in business schools, law schools, and schools that teach educational leadership (Hallinger et al, 1993; Williams, 1992)....
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... The transfer literature also highlights some of the potential limitations of learning in particular contexts. Simply learning to perform procedures, and learning in only a single context, does not promote flexible transfer. The transfer literature suggests that the most effective transfer may come ... a balance of specific examples and general principles, not from either one alone....
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... SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION...
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... A major goal of schooling is to prepare students for flexible adaptation to new problems and settings. The ability of students to transfer provides an important index of ...
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... Several critical features of learning affect people’s abilities to transfer what they have learned. The amount and kind of initial learning is a key determinant of the development of expertise and the ability to transfer knowledge. Students are motivated to spend ... time needed to learn complex subjects and to solve problems that they find interesting. Opportunities to use knowledge to create products and benefits for others are particularly motivating for students....
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... While time on task is necessary for learning, it is not sufficient for effective learning. Time spent learning for understanding has different consequences for transfer than time spent simply memorizing facts or procedures...
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... from textbooks or lectures. In order for learners to gain insight into their learning and their understanding, frequent feedback is critical: students need to monitor their learning and actively evaluate their strategies and their current levels of ...
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... than knowledge that is taught in multiple contexts. With multiple contexts, students are more likely to abstract the relevant features of concepts and develop a more flexible representation of knowledge. The use of well-chosen contrasting cases can help students learn the conditions under which new ...
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... All new learning involves transfer. Previous knowledge can help or hinder the understanding of new information. For example, knowledge of everyday counting-based arithmetic can make it difficult to deal with rational numbers; assumptions ... on everyday physical experiences (e.g., walking upright on a seemingly flat earth) can make it difficult for learners to understand concepts in astronomy and physics and so forth. Teachers can help students change their original conceptions by helping students make their thinking ... so that misconceptions can be corrected and so that students can be encouraged to think beyond the specific problem or to think about variations on the problem. One aspect of previous knowledge ... is extremely important for understanding learning is cultural practices that support learners’ prior knowledge. Effective teaching supports positive transfer by actively identifying ... relevant knowledge and strengths that students bring to a learning situation and building on them....
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... Transfer from school to everyday environments is the ultimate purpose of school-based learning. An analysis of everyday environments provides opportunities to rethink school practices in order to bring them into alignment with ...
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... students learn about themselves as learners in the context of acquiring content knowledge. One characteristic of experts is an ability to monitor and regulate their own understanding in ways that allows them to keep learning adaptive expertise: this is an important model for students to emulate....

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