Very kindly, Greg Ashman posted his thoughts on #WrongBook on his site yesterday – if you haven’t seen his ‘review’ you can find it here. I really like both the style and the substance of Greg’s piece, but I do want to take him up on the way he’s interpreted my use of the term ‘transfer’. In the book, I define learning as, “The ability to retain skills and knowledge over the long term and to be able to transfer them to new contexts.” Greg is unhappy with the inclusion of transfer in this definition and argues the following:
It sets the bar too high for learning and implies that anything that does not lead to transfer is not true learning. This idea has been used by educationalists to argue that traditional ‘transmission’ teaching does not lead to ‘deep’ learning and that we need other methods instead. There is usually little evidence supplied that these alternative methods do actually lead to greater transfer but the assertion gets a lot of currency nonetheless.
Transfer is difficult and not even required in many situations. Who regularly solves novel problems? Professional problem-solvers – engineers, plumbers, statisticians – are usually solving variations on well-known problems (thanks to Barry Garelick for shaping my thinking on this). The elevation of transfer tends to do what Didau cautions us against when pursuing taxonomies such as Bloom’s; it devalues ‘lower’ kinds of objectives and makes learning the basics of a subject seem prosaic and unworthy.
I’d never come up against this view before and found myself somewhat startled by it, so clearly the concept of ‘transfer’ needs a little more unpicking than I’d previously thought. Although I’m sure it’s not deliberate, I think Greg has misrepresented my view of transfer. In the book, I’m explicit that ‘far transfer’ between different domains – the idea that you could learn the skill of analysis in history and then apply it physics – is a bit of a fool’s errand. Instead, I’m talking about ‘near’, contextual transfer. Transfer from the classroom to the exam hall for instance. It can be staggering how often students struggle to transfer what they’ve learned from one seat in a classroom to another seat in the same room! Surely everyone needs to be able to transfer knowledge from the context in which they’ve learned to the context in which they’d need to apply it. The trouble is, when we learn a thing in one context we rely on environmental cues in order to recall it, when we change the context the absence of those can cues can cause us to be unable to retrieve what may have been secure in another location. Is this really setting the bar too high?
This is categorically not about he type of ‘novel’ problems Greg talks about in his review. I’m not claiming any need for generic problem solving which ‘transfers’ through some spooky, osmotic process, and I certainly don’t want my plumber to attempt transferring her plumbing skills to my electrical wiring. That said, I do want my plumber to transfer what she’s learned about plumbing toilets in different contexts to the context of my leaky toilet.
Greg points out that some people use the concept of transfer as an excuse for their criticism of transmission teaching. I’m not quite sure how these ‘educationalists’ manage this conjuring trick, but I have no truck with them. It might be true that lots of people misuse or misunderstand transfer, but it’s always worth considering Sturgeon’s Law: If 90% of everything is crap, let’s talk about the 10%. I use the term transfer because it is part of Robert Bjork definition of learning and, at least in part, my book is a treatment of his ideas, but far as I can see, any definition of learning which does not account for people being unable to reproduce a thing in a new context is dubious. It seems uncontroversial to suggest that knowledge ought to be both durable and flexible.
But let’s be really clear here and say that privileging transfer over retention is stupid. They are equally important functions of improving storage strength and as such both benefit from teaching in a way which focus on embedding learning in long-term memory. I’m pretty clear that teaching ought to contain elements of explicit instruction (explanations & modelling) as well as opportunities for scaffolded struggle and independent practice. Whilst there’s no benefit to introducing struggle at the point of encoding (transmission) there does appear to be compelling reasons to believe that certain ‘desirable difficulties‘ at the point of retrieval help to increase students’ ability to both retain and transfer the content we wish them to learn.
I hope that at least clarifies what I mean when I talk about transfer. Please feel free to politely disagree below.
Thanks for this David. I have had to review my own approach as a result of the points you have raised. I have, up until now taken the view that knowledge lay on one bank and understanding on the other and learning was the process by which we built the bridge between the two. ( I wrote about it here: http://wp.me/p2LphS-jm)
Whilst I still believe this is the case I had not reflected on the next stage, applying what we have learnt (now understand) to new contexts. I know we can all play with words and their meaning to argue a point and sometimes we get lost in the argument and miss the point but as we seek to reach common understanding this process is important.
Taking elements of what has been learnt in one “learning environment” and ‘transferring’ them to another is a process that to me involves a series of steps. These would include recognising the elements of a problem, analysis. The ability to see links with existing knowledge, ideas. The determination of a satisfactory solution, understanding. The implementation or action to resolve the problem using the chosen idea, realisation. A form of reflection to determine degree of success and further learning, evaluation.
Creative types may recognise a form of the “design process” (http://wp.me/p2LphS-40 ) in these steps and I make no apologies for this. I see “transfer” as part of the problem solving process that encompasses a number of stages or strategies. I would add “understanding” to the process too for this helps determine suitable solutions and even though, as Greg suggests, few solve novel problems understanding is critical in making this an efficient process. Experience only goes so far in some situations, even in well known problems. As my dad used to say “Anyone can do it right first time. It takes a professional to put it right when it goes wrong.”
To sum up then I see “transfer” and “understanding” as the twin bridges spanning between the opposing banks of knowledge and application.
In my view, knowledge and understanding are almost the same thing; you can’t understand what you don’t know although there may be times you know something you don’t really understand. This is what psychologists refer to as flexible and inflexible knowledge. I’d say that my definition of transfer is pretty similar to flexible knowledge.
Mmm. I remember learning the table for saying “the” in German. At the time I did not (and still don’t) understand the different cases so could not apply the correct “the” in sentence structure. I knew something but did not understand and therefore could not apply. Inflexible knowledge? To me it’s pivots around application, being able to apply something you know to a situation that you have not learnt that knowledge in. Flexible knowledge? This application in a different context discounts experience to some extent. Perhaps being almost the same thing is enough to make it different too!
Yes, that’s a good example of inflexible knowledge. Being able to apply in new contexts would suggest flexible knowledge.
Useful to think about transfer as distinct from application, I think, although I am not very clear in my own mind. There was a lot of work done on the transfer of knowledge from one context (where it was learned) to another. It was generally found that we are poor at this, but that we can be taught deliberately to do it. We have to be trained to step back in context B and wonder whether we have any general understandings which might apply and which we might have learned somewhere. So transfer of knowledge seems to be a somewhat unnatural skill which must be learned as a separate, specific tool. This might be better spoken of as application rather than transfer?
We used to define lectures as the transfer of information from lecturer’s notes onto students’ paper without passing through the minds of either. That is a different kind of transfer, I think.
Thanks Hugo – I suppose this is what Greg’s getting at when he laments the vague, ill-defined ways in which transfer is bandied about and it’s why I’ve taken he trouble to try to be as precise as I can in my definition. To be clear, although I’m not really talking about application, that must be part of what I mean: to learn a thing in Context 1 and be then able to apply it in Context 2 is a pretty good proxy for learning.
Your observation that children struggle to take learning from one seat to another in the same classroom agrees with a lot of research. We have to be taught, overtly and specifically, to take learning from context A and apply it in context B. It is a different, and separate skill, apparently, and not the same as grasping the understanding in the first place.
We are not innately good at taking knowledge even from seat one to seat two, as you have seen for yourself. A lot of the training we get on how to pass exams is in fact in exactly this sort of transfer of understanding into a new context. If you can find the knowledge, you have transferred it from teaching to learning; if you can then write an answer using it in an exam hall then you have transferred the understanding of transferring understanding into application. I think.
I think a great deal of life could be said to be the confronting and solution of new problems. Training often involves the imagining of new contexts and application of learned ideas therein, and, importantly, the inculcation of the habit of thinking overtly about the transfer of learning or experience to such new contexts.
Write the importance of learning transfer