Teaching for Transfer

Below is the complete response of Maria Angelita Carlos on the discussion board on teaching for transfer. I noted her inputs because they are very informative and relevant to my study. I do hope that the readers will also find this worthy of note. Original entry can be find here : http://myportal.upou.edu.ph/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=47302



☼ Teaching for transfer - Teachers will develop ideas about how to facilitate transfer in their own classrooms and how to build bridges for their students between concepts, activities, and lessons.

♦Transfer is the ability to extend what one has learned in one context to new contexts. The ultimate goal of schooling is to help students transfer what they have learned in school to the everyday settings of home, community, and work, we have much to learn from the non-school environments where people work.

♦The challenge of transfer: How can students use what they have learned by applying it to solve new problems? Given the vast array of knowledge needed in life,

♦The teacher’s challenge is to determine what is the least amount of material that she can teach really well that will allow students to use that knowledge in the widest possible range of situations.

♦For instance, in elementary school, students learn addition, subtraction, and multiplication and then at some point they also learn long division. Learning long division requires transfer because students have to take what they already know about adding, subtracting, and multiplying, and apply all three of those processes to learning a new kind of skill called division.

♦We can transfer an idea from one situation and use it in a new, but similar context. If a student has learned about the notion of a revolution while studying world history, she can transfer or apply the notion of revolution to her study of Philippine history. Later, she can apply these
understandings to other context when studying the another country's revolution.

♦We can also transfer within a subject matter, as with the concept of revolution, as well as across subject matter areas.

inspirations:
learnweb.harvard.edu/alps/thinkin
www.cdtl.nus.edu.sg/link/