How Will You Work On Transferring Knowledge?

I want us to read some passages from a The Chronicle of Higher Education series article called "Why Don't They Apply What They've Learned," Part 1 and Part 2, and then respond to the questions I've posed under each excerpt:

"Ambrose and her co-authors point to two reasons for the failure-to-transfer that all of us see sometimes in our students. First, they might tie whatever knowledge or skill we are teaching too closely to the context in which they learned it. Thus, students can write innovative opening paragraphs in my freshman-composition course, but in their other classes they continue to rely on the same strategies they learned in high school. Second, the inability to transfer a skill or information to a novel context might indicate shallow levels of learning. If students are capable of solving problems, writing essays, or answering questions according to some formula they have learned, they might not have grasped the underlying principles of our course content. Without that deeper knowledge of what lies beneath the formula, they can't pick up what they are learning and put it back down in an unrelated context."  [from Part 1]

• How have we, this semester, tried to gain "deeper knowledge of what lies beneath the formula"?

• How do you think you will take the "far transfer" writing and thinking we have don't this semester to your future? 

• Can you give me a few examples?

...

"For example, one pattern he found among highly successful college students was the willingness to embrace and learn from failure. The comedian and talk show host Stephen Colbert, one of Bain's more famous subjects, describes how improvisational theater taught him to see the value of failure—to learn from the experience and then move beyond it. "You haven't done it before," Colbert says, speaking about how he learned to embrace failed first-time learning efforts, "how could you possibly get it perfectly right?"

• One of our core messages: failure is part of growth. 
• How do you deal with failure--what are some of the things you do when you fail at things?
• How may you change how you deal with failure going forward, starting this summer?

But the pattern that struck me most forcefully in Bain's subjects related to the subject of far transfer. The very first story he tells in the book, after his introductory chapter, describes a student who entered college with four major questions he wanted to answer—deep, profound questions, the kind that it would take a lifetime of learning to understand, much less answer. The first of them was "Why does anything exist?"; the last was "What's the nature of intelligence?"

That student, unsurprisingly, "took a deep approach to learning, asking in every field why and how, and trying to connect everything together." His own words describe a thinking skill—building theoretical models—that he learned and then transferred to multiple disciplines: "You could build models in math," he said to Bain, "but you could also do it in music, in business, and in engineering." 

Transfer occurred for that student because he was seeking answers to his own questions. Every learning experience he had was automatically filtered through the lens of the big questions he wanted to explore, and the habit of seeing across courses and disciplines led him to the kind of connected educational experience that we want for our students.

Bain heard something similar from Colbert, who "took control of his education and began to decide what areas he would explore when he was 10 years old." Bain heard the same thing from an investigative journalist who would earn his fame working with students to help overturn death-penalty convictions, and whose big college questions "centered around justice and how to maintain it and create it." He heard it from a doctor who "chose every course at Boston University with one goal in mind: getting into medical school and becoming a physician." And not just pre-med courses: "She majored in social psychology because she thought it would help her become a better physician."

Those students transferred knowledge and skills from course to course because they brought their own questions and interests to their college experience. Whatever they might have been asked to learn in any one course, they sought to understand how everything they learned connected to their overarching questions and interests. They were able to see how a problem-solving skill learned in one class could help them in another, or how a piece of knowledge from one course connected to another, because they oriented themselves toward some larger question, challenge, or problem. That orientation encouraged them to transfer learning across contexts, to make connections, and to see the bigger picture." [from Part 2]

• What types of questions do you have for your own education? Come up with two, for now.
• How will you try to connect what you learned in our course to other courses?
• Have you already used ideas and texts used in here to discuss work in your other courses?