‘We approach transfer not as some mystical superpower but as a skill that can be trained’ confirm Prof. Michael Thomas and Dr. Cathy Rogers in their latest and most insightful article about the transfer of learning. The authors (Centre of Educational Neuroscience) describe ‘transfer as the ability to take learning from one situation and apply it in another. Given how the brain works, this is a difficult task, since without explicit instruction otherwise, knowledge lies in silos […] The skills in the transfer of learning involve teaching students to approach a new situation with the idea of searching through their previous knowledge, skills and strategies to see what might be relevant. It is teaching students to think about their thinking and learn about how they learn. It’s called metacognition’ (Educational Neuroscience: The Basics, 2022).
To find out more about the transfer of learning, click on the link below:
Keith Attard, a biology teacher, who focused on the transfer of learning in his master’s degree in Educational Neuroscience, also gave his contribution towards this aspect of learning within the Maltese context:
“In a 30-week race to complete our assigned syllabus, covering material quickly takes paramount importance in the education experience of our students. Teachers need to keep a good pace throughout the school year to be able to cover material faster and get it all done by the time annual examinations arrive. Class discussions, creative moments and train of thoughts that our students take from the lesson (often times more relevant to them than anything we’re trying to cover) are sacrificed at the ‘altar of the curriculum’. “Sorry we don’t have time to pursue this further, please let’s re-focus on page 79 of our notes”; a common anti-climax to many interesting conversations and learning opportunities in our classroom.
If students retain knowledge but are still not able to apply what they have learnt when they are required to, then the effectiveness of schooling is greatly reduced. That is why we also need to focus on the transfer aspect of education. How can we stimulate students to better retain knowledge, and at the same time abstract information and map it to problems that are new to them? If we want to empower our students to be able to master certain skills and knowledge and then apply them to new settings, it is not enough to ask them to re-write what they have learnt, individuals must be able to use what they have in memory and cross it between different learning domains to apply it to new contexts. How can we go beyond improving retention of information to transferring that knowledge?
Much of the financial and human investment in education can only be justified if schooling truly helps cultivate certain skills in individuals that they can then use to become productive members of society. The world is changing so fast that most of the names, concepts and theorems that students are confronted with at school are unlikely to be of any relevance to the students once they finish schooling, unless they are able to apply curriculum concepts to fresh ideas and problems that they are faced with.
Transfer of learning takes time. A problem solver must first recognise that a problem is similar to another so a number of relevant pieces of information stored in long-term memory can be accessed. The general characteristics of a familiar example must then be abstracted to the target so that the structural similarities can be aligned. These two steps lead to the last stage of analogical reasoning where inferences can be made about the new learning experience and knowledge is mapped from the source to the target to create new information and fill gaps in understanding. These processes cause learning, as more abstract schemas and categories are created in long-term memory that can be accessed later on making it easier to solve similar problems.
When we are presented with new information, our short-term memory systems start interacting with each other and with long-term memory storage to try and find similar knowledge to the one being presented in the hope of making sense of it. One such temporary storage is known as the episodic buffer and it is capable of holding information both in the verbal and the visual/spatial form and combine it with long-term memory. This storage is unique in the way that it can integrate and modify information resulting in a change of knowledge or learning. This ability of combining two separate tasks from different domains, the buffer provides mechanisms that can model the environment and create new cognitive representations, which facilitate problem solving and analogical transfer. In the process of this reasoning, a new problem becomes another example of the same concept, and in mapping between the two situations, a more abstract model is created that can be applied to other problems. To solve a particular problem, an individual has to comprehend the relationship between an old situation and the new one and match them together. Ultimately, transfer of learning is being able to use what you learnt out of school to use it in real world.
During higher-order thinking such as problem solving, investigations, evaluation, and other creative tasks, students deploy these transfer of learning skills, and when enough time is given to them, there is more opportunity for the brain to remember the information better and more importantly be able to apply it later on and find it useful. If we really want our students to learn to think creatively, outside the box and be able solve problems, this kind of learning needs to take centre stage. Unfortunately, as things stand, opportunities for transfer of learning remain low in the classroom and in the curriculum. Covering the syllabus ends up taking priority over other learning experiences that we “don’t have time for”.”
References:
Barnett, S. M., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological bulletin, 128, 612–637.
Halpern, D. F., & Hakel, M. D. (2002). Learning that lasts a lifetime: teaching for long-term retention and transfer. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 89. 3-7.
Halpern, D. F., & Hakel, M. D. (2003). Applying the science of learning to the university and beyond: Teaching for long-term retention and transfer. Change: the magazine of higher learning, 35, 36–41.
Kolodner, J. L. (1997). Educational implications of analogy. American psychologist, 52, 57–66.
Bio
Keith is a biology teacher with a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Malta and a Master’s degree in Educational Neuroscience from London’s Birkbeck College and UCL’s Institute of Education. His professional experience includes teaching biology in a number of local state senior schools and at the University of Malta Junior College. More recently he has also developed modules for the Educational Neuroscience Programme at the Institute for Education in Malta and delivers lectures in the subject mainly in Cognitive Neuroscience & Learning and Developmental Neuroscience.