My main objection to the ER piece is its neglect of students as
knowers/doers - questions of identity that the authors allude to,
top of p. 9, "...the real goal should be to get students motivated and
engaged in cognitive processes that will transfer." They go on to assert
"What is
important is what cognitive processes a problem evokes and not what real-world
trapppings it might have." But the real-world-ed-ness of problems vis a vis
students, relevance to their lives, meaningfulness, seems linked in powerful
ways to motivation. In my own work, I've seen how students get access to
academically valued know-how & knowlegve by first getting IN to privileged
classroom practices by controlling turns at talk or otherwise positioning
themselves or being positioned as "good students" (whether or not they have
performed as such on prior tests of academically valued knowledge) - and
vice versa: how not being seen/treated, not seeing oneself, as a legitimate
participant predicts academic failure.
Jay's question, "How independent of gender, social class, and culture are
transfer effects?" is foregrounded by such concerns. Haven't research
studies shown that boys are especially good at getting the teacher's
attention, getting positioned as knowers & doers, etc. (there's one of
kindergarten that shows boys sitting closer to the teacher, waving their
hands around; there's Jungwirth's study of teachers' differential responses
to boys and girls in
mathematics classes; etc)
Again, I emphasize that I have no objection to teaching analogs of a
single problem, or to searching for grammatical principles of any
activity, but not at the cost of ignoring the politics of
knowledge/knowing/teaching/learning. Not at the cost of
ignoring the real world or diminishing its relevance to what schools are
all about. Not at the cost of treating all students as if they were the
same, neutral, WMC male student.
So not to be polemical, maybe we can work on reframing questions of
transfer.
- Judy
PM 5/18/96 EST, you wrote:
>
>
> What Jay says about transfer seems to boil down to: Sometimes it does.
> Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it isn't worth the effort (but maybe
> sometimes it is?). And sometimes it works better for some than for
> others. That seems to me to be a plausible agenda for research, and
> maybe for practice.
>
> As I read the research so far it suggests that sometimes it helps to
> be explicit about the elements or dimensions on which future
> occasions/events/problems might be similar. I can relate to your
> point about physicists and mathematicians, but I don't think that the
> argument here is in favor of the "purely" abstract - it is that maybe
> abstractions help mediate transfer or direct attention to the aspects
> that are the focus of instruction (as in Gelman re: fractions??).
>
> I just realized this resonates with a long ago xlchc discussion of
> genre - and whether we are doing folks a favor by not introducing them
> to priveleged or arcane genres - or _was_ that part of the discussion?
> I didn't get into it at the time.
>
> Fritz Mosher
>
>
>
Judy Diamondstone
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08903
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
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