Judy confidently walked into the testing room, feeling quite prepared for the college examination test. After all, she had made A’s in almost every high school course, had done all her homework, and was often the first to raise her hand in class. So she found her seat, opened the test booklet and read the first question.
A feeling of panic overcame her as she looked at a math problem expressed in a way that she had never seen before. “Wait,” she thought, “Our teacher didn’t ask us anything like this! I’ve never thought about right angles in everyday life outside of school. I’m in trouble.”
Sadly, this type of event happens all too often to students, says Grant Wiggins, co-developer of Understanding by Design and the author of many other books on effective instruction.
Wiggins is writing a series of blogs based on his research about the current state of “student comprehension” in our schools. What he is finding is not encouraging, but he doesn’t stop there. His ideas about what we can do to improve the situation are what make these posts so valuable.
The transfer of learning
While I’ve been captivated by Wiggins’ entire series on comprehension, one recent post particularly caught my attention. Apparently, it caught the attention of many of you who frequent the ABPC Facebook page. When we shared it there, more than 850 people considered it.
This particular blog post addressed the question: Do students understand that the aim of instruction is transfer of learning?
Wiggins’ unqualified response to that question is, for the most part, they do not. He suggests that the problem is that in many classrooms, students (like Judy) are not challenged to think deeply about what they are learning and how it relates to real world problems and situations.
Wiggins says the issue of transfer is so important that he and colleague Jay McTighe made transfer-oriented instruction a major focus in the 2011 ASCD book, The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units.
In his blog post, Wiggins points to numerous indications that underscore the fact that students do not understand that the long-term and bottom-line goal of education should be the transfer of learning. “Here is a key and very concrete indicator – from students: ‘That’s unfair! You asked us questions different from the ones we went over in class!’”
Sounded familiar to me, but I wanted to check with others to learn their response. I turned to an instructional partner (coach) and asked her to read the blog. She agreed with Wiggins’ conclusions and suggested what she saw as the possible reason:
“I think it is because students are rarely given opportunities to do so [transfer learning] because of most of our instructional delivery models. Explicit instruction, gradual release, and lecture/learn models all are based on the teacher showing a student exactly how to perform a specific skill/strategy/procedure in the confines of a specific situation.
“Perhaps if schools would shift to problem-based models, workshop models, collaborative models, and facilitation models, then our students could spend time in productive struggle of matching a strategy to its use in real-world scenarios.”
So, what does Wiggins suggest should teachers do to ensure student transfer of their learning? To answer that question, he focuses on reading comprehension by turning to two very influential research studies.
First, he points to Brown and Palinscar’s research on reciprocal teaching (1989) which underscores the importance of questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting. Wiggins notes that these strategies “serve an interesting dual function, if used intelligently” in that they simultaneously improve comprehension and “afford the alert reader an opportunity for monitoring understanding.”
Wiggins then turns to the seminal book How People Learn (2000) to illustrate his point and to provide some principles on teaching for transfer in comprehension. Implied in these critical passages are a few ideas about how to more successfully address transfer as a goal in reading comprehension.
Some ways help students strengthen transfer
Wiggins specifically addresses four strategies suggested by research that can help students transfer learning:
1. Constant and clear emphasis on understanding what is being read. Wiggins suggests that a question a teacher might pose to reinforce this understanding is: “So, are we understanding this text better? If not, what might help us here?”
2. Teaching and using the strategies at the same time, not in isolation. “It must be clear to students that, like hammers and screw-drivers, strategies are tools for building and improving (understandings, in this case). Thus, the development of conditional knowledge – considering which strategies work well, when, and why – has to become a priority, based on students analyzing what works and what doesn’t in attempts to understand.”
3. Helping students learn how to self-monitor by raising their own questions and gauging their own understanding.
4. The teacher also is constantly monitoring for understanding so that “comprehension success and failure becomes key.”
There’s much more to this post, including Wiggins’ dialogue with literacy learning expert David Pearson (who offers the advice “to provide explicit instruction ONLY after kids have proven to themselves that they could use a little guidance”). So I hope you’ll read the entire post (#7) here.
Perhaps if more educators strive to help students transfer their learning to not-always-predictable situations, students in the future will have a very different testing experience from Judy. And, even more importantly, they will be well-prepared for an ever-changing future.
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Related Wiggins blog posts
about effective literacy learning
Although his naming and numbering conventions are somewhat haphazard, Grant Wiggins began his series on literacy instruction in February 2015, and it will likely continue for months to come, as he addresses various recommendations he made in post #6. We’ll try to update this list as new entries appear.
Be sure to read the many comments associated with the posts and make contributions of your own. As Wiggins says in post #3, the dialogue with readers has kept him writing for more than 200 posts “for no pay, and with surprisingly little pain!”
► Maybe we don’t understand what readers really do – and why it matters (Part 1 – unnumbered)
► On reading, Part 2: what the research REALLY reveals
► My 200th Post – On Literacy Part 3
► On reading, Part 4: research on the comprehension strategies – a closer look
► On Reading, Part 5: A key flaw in using the Gradual Release of Responsibility model
► On literacy and strategy, part 6: my first cut at recommendations
► On transfer as the goal in literacy (7th in a series)
► On wise text selection for developing comprehension (8th in a series)
Follow Wiggins’ Granted, and . . . blog for new entries. You can add yourself to his email list and be alerted about fresh posts.
