CAREER: Framing Learning Contexts to Promote Transfer-of-Learning

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

The purpose of this proposal is to systematically investigate how instruction can be designed to encourage students to transfer what they have learned from one context to other contexts. The research is based on the premise that it is not just the content of what students learn that matters for transfer, but also how learning contexts are framed, which may be in a more expansive or bounded manner. The hypothesis is that contexts framed expansively are more likely to support transfer-of-learning because they encourage students to orient to current learning activities as opportunities to join larger intellectual conversations that extend across time, places, topics, and people. High school biology students will participate in a series of experiments to systematically test the extent to which different aspects of expansively framed instruction support the transfer of knowledge and practices from one-on-one tutoring about the cardiovascular system to learning about the respiratory system and other science topics. A parallel series of comparative studies will then be conducted in high school biology classes to investigate how to best incorporate expansive framing into the classroom to have the most powerful effects on transfer. This research is important because if instruction can be modified to better promote transfer, then science education will have a much greater impact on students? lives. Too often students learn science ideas in relative isolation, failing to connect the ideas or grasp the key concepts that could serve them in their future schooling, careers, and as scientifically literate citizens. Further, if this work is successful, it can support the development of curriculum units and teacher training materials that will allow these methods to make a difference for an increasingly wide range of students.