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transfer

How helpful is Hattie & Donoghue’s model of learning? Part 2: The meta analyses

2017-06-18T12:09:33+01:00June 18th, 2017|learning|

To help us better understand how we learn, John Hattie & Gregory Donoghue propose a new conceptual model of learning. I've already written about my concerns with the metaphor of depth in Part 1. In this post I want to explore what his meta analyses reveal about the best approaches to take with students at different stages in the journey from novice to expert. Inputs The first layer of Hattie & Donoghue's model is termed 'inputs' or, what children bring to the process of learning. These are grouped into three areas dubbed skill, will and thrill. The most important individual differences between students [...]

The trouble with transfer: How can we make learning more flexible?

2016-10-24T12:22:16+01:00October 17th, 2016|learning, psychology|

I define learning as the long-term retention of knowledge and skills and the ability to transfer between contexts. The retention bit is fairly straightforward and uncontroversial: if you can't remember something tomorrow, can you really be said to have learned it? As Kirschner, Sweller & Clark put it, "If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.” Transfer though is a bit trickier. In essence it's the quality of flexibility; can what you know in one context be applied in another? As Daniel Willingham says, "Knowledge is flexible when it can be accessed out of the context in which it was [...]

What is 'transfer' and is it important?

2015-09-17T22:19:53+01:00September 17th, 2015|learning|

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 [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #4 Context

2015-06-29T14:55:29+01:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

This is the fourth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 4: "Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated." The fact that learning occurs in context is well established. Our ability to retrieve information is heavily context dependent - we link it to related subject matter, times, places, people and feelings. I've written before about the variation effect and troubling finding that students often struggle to transfer what they have been taught from one [...]

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