3 Learning and Transfer

I found this chapter to be both interesting and a little frustrating. Transfer, or analogous thinking, might be the most important skill available to the human mind, and yet there is no formal training on it in schools. The best teachers will try to take prior knowledge into consideration when teaching, but for the most part, classes are still taught in silos as though there is no application of mathematics that is relevant to the study of history, or there is no use for the communication skills learned in English class in the study of science.

As an undergrad, I frequently worked as a math tutor to make extra money. When teaching fractions, I always asked, "Do you like pizza?" I would then proceed to make analogies to pizza in my explanations. For decimals, I used money, and to combine the two, quarters were a convenient analogy. Using these analogies was always helpful for students. I never had a struggling student whose score wasn't improved by the use of prior knowledge in this way.

Since research shows that transfer is so crucial to basic learning as well as to making basic learning more meaningful, why don't we have transfer in mind as a basic skill? It dovetails so nicely with everything else that research has found effective. Assignments could include instructions to explain what was learned to another student using an analogy to something that student already knows. A task to write a word problem using something the student encounters in every day such as sports or a favorite video game incorporates both transfer and communication skills. To my mind, transfer is the keystone of education. We need to put more emphasis on it, rather than having it as an afterthought.