Week 5: Gaming, Transfer & More!

In this past week’s class, we discussed formative and summative assessment—their similarities, differences, and respective strengths and weaknesses. I was reassured by professor’s argument that librarians, by nature (or training), are adept at providing formative assessment, usually in the form of helping answer patron questions. Additionally, we discussed some of the various mediums (polls, surveys, etc.) that librarians can employ when wanting to assess the progress of their learners.

We also broke up into groups and organized little pieces of paper (representing either a question or a statement) into appropriate categories. What was most interesting about this activity was being able to observe everyone else’s interpretation of the notes. So many of the classification schemas occurred to me as clever and inspired yet were so far from my own line of thinking. It’s a bit discomforting to realize that there are so many ways of classifying ideas—in other words, there’s really no right or wrong way to categorize. Indeed, my classmates’ work proves that there are several sensible interpretations.

Before learning all about assessment, and even before our classification group assignment, we watched a TED talk given by Dr. Jane McGonigal on video games and their importance. Never having witnessed a TED talk before, I was impressed at the persuasiveness and enthusiasm of the speaker. In particular, I liked how McGonigal was able to communicate her excitement for a specific topic (gaming) to a wide audience of presumably gamers and non-gamers alike. As someone with only amateurish knowledge and interest in gaming, I was still compelled by the speaker’s argument. I speculate that this is because: (1) the speaker’s tone was engaging and straightforward, (2) the specifics of video games were ignored in favor of more abstract concepts, and (3) gaming ideas were related to more mainstream, real-world topics (history, current events, etc.). And with this in mind, it’s time to talk about transfer.

How People Learn defines transfer as the “ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts.” This does not just mean transferring what one learned last night studying his biology textbook to a biology test tomorrow. Rather, transfer is the idea that learning about a subject (like biology) can be somehow later applied in a real-world context (like in a job as a laboratory assistant). More broadly still, transfer can mean being able to reuse conceptual ideas or critical thinking skills in completely different environments. For this reason, the authors of How People Learn stress that abstract learning is important.  

Merely learning a skill or a bit of knowledge is no guarantee that meaningful learning is occurring. The authors point out numerous examples of research that show students who learn how to do something without understanding the underlying reasons why demonstrate lower transfer rates. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind what students already know. That is, to promote additional learning, educators need to build upon—or challenge—prior learning. This is important because it safeguards against unintended learning consequences, usually by interpreting new concepts incorrectly in terms of past experiences.

The second article for this week (“Put Understanding First”) also focused on transfer, but the authors, Wiggins and McTighe, are especially concerned with how this transfer can occur within educational environments. Accordingly, they outline a 12-step lesson plan for implementing real learning and real transfer in classrooms. Overall, the message of their article—stress meaning and transfer over content—seems valid, but their prescribed procedure for encouraging better learning is probably not applicable in all situations. I was, however, in agreement with the authors’ recommendation for creating a syllabus for high school classes that would outline how a course would lead to improved transfer, meaning and acquisition.

This week’s reading about learning and transfer also reminded me of the screencast assignment two weeks ago, especially how our instructor emphasized that we should try to point out in our tutorial skills that carry across multiple contexts—e.g., searching a library catalog can be a lot like searching Google. This idea makes sense on its own, but reading this week’s chapter of How People Learn really hit home the message: effective learning means being able to transfer skills. As an instructor, you want your students to learn specific skills and content, but you also want to offer them a broad enough knowledge base that they can apply what they’ve learned in one lesson in another context. After all, learning that can only be narrowly realized (e.g., through successful test taking) is of little value.