Chapter 1, page 22
Problem 1.2 Evaluating teaching: Evaluating teaching: Assessing far transfer
Garrett is an 8th grade history teacher who has recently been learning about transfer in his graduate
work at the local university. In this 8th grade classes, he has been teaching students to summarize one-
page passages from their history textbook in class. He wants to create a far transfer task to see if
students can transfer their skills. He asks them to get a magazine at home and summarize an article
that is at least three pages long. Has Garrett succeeded in creating an assessment of far transfer?
Response: This is a fairly good far transfer task. It differs from the in-class training in several respects.
They are summarizing a longer text than they were summarizing in class. Magazine writing is a
different genre from textbook writing, so there are some new challenges in writing summaries. The
topics of the magazine articles will be quite different from the topics in social studies texts. Students
are doing the summaries at home rather than at school. Thus, the transfer situation is different on a
number of dimensions from the situation in which they were trained. This is a fairly good far transfer
task.
Problem 1.3 Evaluating teaching: Designing instruction:
Students have been learning to write persuasive essays in writing class on topics relating to stories they
are reading. Create a real-world far transfer task that assesses students’ ability to write persuasive
essays.
Response: Many answers are possible here. Your transfer task should differ in as many respects as
possible from the situation in which students were writing persuasive essays in school.