EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 8, page 181

2. You can use the questions in instruction. By asking students novel, challenging questions and posing
   novel, challenging problems in your class, you can help students achieve deep understanding.


3. Obviously, you can use the questions to assess what students have learned.


4. Whenever you are trying to construct questions that assess understanding, ask yourself this question: IF
   I SUBSTITUTED NONSENSE WORDS FOR THE KEY WORDS IN THE TEXT AND IN MY
   QUESTIONS, COULD MY STUDENTS STILL GET THE ANSWERS RIGHT? If the answer is yes,
   you’d better start over.

ASSESSING FOR TRANSFER

Obviously, the goal of education is not to produce students who are highly skilled at taking unit tests.
The goal of education is to produce students who can do things in the real world--design bridges, keep
accurate accounts, market cars, discover new cures for cancer, negotiate agreements, choose investments,
vote wisely, and so on and so on. In other words, we want our students to transfer what they are learning
in classes to tasks in the real world. Transfer refers to using information learned in one situation in a
different situation. Researchers have found that transfer is extremely difficult to obtain. In this chapter,
you will learn about the difficulty of obtaining transfer and some techniques that you can use to increase
the chances that transfer will happen among your students.

The Difficulty of Achieving Transfer

Over the past century, researchers have repeatedly found that it is very difficult to obtain transfer. In
other words, people often (or usually) fail to transfer knowledge to situations in which that knowledge is
relevant.

Here are some examples of research that has failed to find transfer:

1. Historically, one of the arguments for learning languages such as Latin and Greek was that
   learning Latin and Greek would improve one’s general thinking ability. Research has not found any such
   transfer. It is possible that learning Latin may help a little with English vocabulary, but if your goal is to
   learn English vocabulary, you would be far, far better off spending your time studying English vocabulary
   than spending the same amount of time studying Latin. The finding that training in classical languages did
   not transfer to other aspects of thinking or reasoning was one of the important early findings of the field of
   educational psychology.


2. Many people believe that studying computer programming helps students get generally better at
   problem-solving ability because students learn to think through a problem very thoroughly. Research has
   been clear on this point. When students learn a computer programming language, they do not show
   improvement on tasks other than programming a computer. They often do not even show transfer to
   another computer language, at least in the early stages of learning. Even worse, students who learn to
   program in a language frequently fail to transfer their knowledge to troubleshooting a program in the same
   language, and vice versa.


3. People who are very good at doing comparative pricing at a supermarket are often completely
   unable to solve exactly the same problems when presented as paper and pencil tests. For instance, in one
   study, adults who decided that a 16 ounce can of tomatoes that cost 67¢ was a better buy than a 14 ounce
   can that cost 59¢ were unable to solve the exact same problem when presented as a word problem on a
   piece of paper.