Chapter 1, page 14
Ɣ A high school student learns about advertising in a high school business class. She applies this
procedure to design and implement an advertising plan to increase the number of volunteers at a local
hospital.
Ɣ A married couple who have just had a baby decide to respond quickly to the infant’s cries because they
learned 10 years ago in a high school psychology class that infants who are soothed quickly when they
are in their first months of life cry less as they get older.
Notice that these examples vary in how similar the learning situation is to the transfer situation. In the first
example, the learning situation is very close to the transfer situation, both in setting and in time. The
learner applies what he learns in a math classroom to a problem encountered just two weeks later in the
same math class. But in other examples, the setting is more dissimilar, and the time is longer. In the last
example, the transfer setting is very different from the setting in which learning occurred (raising a child in
a home vs. sitting in a classroom), and the time gap is very long (ten years later). When there are many
differences between the learning situation and the transfer situation, the transfer is called far transfer.
When there are relatively few differences between the learning situations and the transfer situation, the
transfer is called near transfer.
Most educators would agree that the goal of schooling is to develop knowledge that can be
transferred out of school (e.g., John D. Bransford et al., 1999; Kuhn, 1991; Noddings, 2007; Scardamalia
& Bereiter, 2006). Educators want to enable students to participate skillfully in the real world—at their
jobs, in their home lives, and in their lives as a member of the community. If knowledge cannot be used
out of school, the knowledge is ultimately useless. In the classic words of the educational philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead, knowledge that is never used is inert (Whitehead, 1929). There is little or no
point to having knowledge that cannot be used.
Unfortunately, transfer is extremely difficult to achieve (Barnett & Ceci, 2002, in press;
Detterman, 1993). Although most educators do not think that transfer is impossible, most agree that
achieving it is challenging. Students tend not to transfer information. To give just a few examples (we’ll
discuss many more in later chapters):
Ɣ Students who learn to do one kind of math problem often cannot solve problems that are only slightly
different (Reeves & Weisberg, 1994).
Ɣ Students who learn strategies such as summarization or note taking in English class do not use these
same strategies to help them in math class and social studies class, even though the strategies would be
useful in those classes (Pressley & Woloshyn, 1995).
Ɣ Students who learn to write essays presenting arguments on several topics are unable to write a
persuasive essay on a new topic (Page-Voth & Graham, 1999; Yeh, 1998).
These examples are all fairly near transfer. If even near transfer is hard, it is not surprising that far
transfer is even more difficult. Throughout this book, we will be exploring instructional techniques that
overcome these difficulties in achieving transfer. In particular, we will be exploring ways of promoting the
most challenging kind of far transfer: transfer to the real world. Transfer will be the particular focus of
Chapter 14.
Collaboration
Collaboration in schools refers to students working together. Often, the goal of collaboration is to
enhance students’ learning. When the primary goal of collaboration is to help students learn, we call the
collaboration collaborative learning. In other cases, the primary goal of collaboration may be to solve a
problem or to create something, as when a student council meets to decide how to spend its money or a
school newspaper staff meets to plan its next edition.
During the past several decades, educational researchers have argued for the use of collaborative
learning in schools. One reason for this is that collaborative learning environments can enhance the
learning of individual students. When collaborative learning is designed appropriately, students learn more
by working collaboratively than by working individually (Chinn, in press-b; O'Donnell, 2006).