Toward an Integrated Model of Writing Transfer: The Impact of the Individual
By Dana Lynn Driscoll, Department of Writing and Rhetoric, Oakland University Jennifer H. Wells, Writing Center, University of South Florida
Introduction
In the last ten years, a growing body of research has focused on writing transfer and understanding the continued evidence of students’ struggles to transfer writing knowledge from high school to college, course to course, discipline to discipline, and university to workplace settings. Despite an increase in attention, substantial gaps exist in our understanding of best practices for developing programs and pedagogical approaches that encourage transfer. In the last decade, much of the research on writing transfer has focused on two areas: understanding transfer within a socially-constructed activity system (Russell) and developing and addressing the problem of transfer through activity-based, curricular models (Beaufort; Downs and Wardle). For almost thirty years, as a field we have heavily focused on the social context and have largely ignored individualistic aspects to learning to write—but yet, as we’ll argue here, these aspects are of particular of importance to transfer. In this piece, we argue that the individual student attitudes, motivations, and self-efficacy, or what we’ll call dispositional aspects, play a vital role in enabling or inhibiting transfer.
This article provides evidence to encourage writing researchers, teachers, and writing program administrators (WPAs) to consider the role of the individual in the transfer process. We address this in three steps: 1) by examining transfer and writing transfer theories and demonstrating a gap surrounding the individual; 2) by providing evidence for the individual aspects of writing transfer that have been thus far overlooked; and 3) by providing a model of writing transfer that addresses the individual in context, using a dispositional framework. We conclude by applying the model to previous work on transfer and describing next steps.
Defining Transfer
In recent years, transfer of learning has been the focus of substantial attention in all areas of education. In 1999, the National Research Council argues that “transfer” is synonymous with “learning” and that the best primary, secondary, and higher education classrooms include an emphasis on transfer (61). Most definitions of knowledge transfer involve three elements: something learned in the past, something applied in the future, and something that enables what was learned in the past to directly affect or influence what is done in the future (Haskell; Perkins and Salomon; Royer, Mestre and Dufresne). Historically not all knowledge transfer theorists consider the learner and what the learner brings with them to the transfer problem. In some definitions, the learner is something transfer happens to, or through, rather than the agent of transfer. We draw upon McKeough, Lupart, and Marini’s definition which provides the following aspects of transfer: the learner; the instructional tasks (including learning materials and practice problems); the instructional context (the physical and social setting, including the instruction and support provided by the teacher, the behavior of other students, and the norms and expectations inherent in the setting); the transfer task; and the transfer context. (p. 2). We’ll return to this definition after providing some background on current theoretical frameworks for transfer.
Theories of Transfer
Two current theories of transfer as described by Loboto (2003), cognitive and actor-oriented, are currently driving much of the transfer research from outside of the field of writing studies—and subsequently, influencing how writing researchers view transfer. Table 1 describes the shifting assumptions as transfer researchers began shifting from a cognitive approach to an actor-oriented approach. We describe these two theories in the sections below.
Table 1: A Comparison of Assumptions from Two Transfer Approaches (Adapted from Loboto (2003), p. 20)
Type of Approach / Traditional Cognitive View / Actor-Oriented / Activity-BasedDefinition of Transfer / “The application of knowledge learned in one situation to a new situation.” / “The personal construction of relations of similarity across activities (i.e., seeing situations as the same).”
Research Method / Measuring “improved performance on tasks” primarily through experimental design / Examining “the influence of prior activity on current activity and how actors construe situations as similar”. Measuring primarily through context-based case studies.
Research Questions / “Was transfer obtained? What conditions facilitate transfer?” / “What relations of similarity are created? How are they supported by the environment?”
Cognitive-Based Theories of Transfer
With the rise of cognitive psychology in the late 1960’s, earlier transfer theorists examined the relationship between cognition and transfer. This cognitive view of transfer had traditionally dominated much of the research in education and psychology. By studying the “mental processes” that learners use when they attempt to transfer, researchers would “understand what it is that individuals are actually attempting to transfer” (Royer et al., 2005, p. xvii). Royer, Mestre, and Dufrense (2005) write, “Cognitive theories of the transfer of learning were developed in the context of the presentation of ideas about how the human cognitive system was structured and about how it functioned” (xv). Theories of the different types of memory gave way to discussions of comprehension, and comprehension became associated with the transfer of learning. In the cognitive view of transfer, as described by Loboto (2003), transfer is defined as “the application of knowledge learned in one situation to a new situation” (20). Research questions within this view include “was transfer obtained” and “what conditions facilitate transfer”? (20). Most of the research methods using a cognitive approach were experimental or quasi-experimental in nature, and the emphasis was placed on measuring the success of transfer in new contexts. McKeough, Lupart, & Marini argue, however, this approach lead researchers in spending more time documenting failures to achieve transfer than successes, and, as Loboto argues, this may have been as much a limitation in the cognitive paradigm as actual difficulty with transfer. Furthermore, because much of the research within the cognitive transfer paradigm was experimental, the rich contextual nature of learning was lost.
Traditional transfer research from outside of the field has largely been based on?from a cognitive approach until about the last 15 years or so—right when writing studies scholars began to take interest in transfer. Unsurprisingly, as our field embraced the socio-cultural aspects of learning to write, cognitive approaches were overlooked in favor of the more the contextually-based transfer models, as described in the next section.
Context-based Theories of Transfer and Activity Theory
Royer, Mestre, and Dufrense describe the recent theoretical shift in theories between a traditional cognitive view of transfer, held by psychologists, to a more active/socially constructed view of transfer called by several names, including “actor oriented transfer” or transfer based on “activity theory.” Loboto argues that the primary critique of cognitive theories of transfer is that it fails to consider the role that context plays in facilitating or inhibiting transfer (p.18). In a contextually-based view, transfer is less about the individual, but rather about the contextual relationships between activity systems or discourse communities that an individual inhabits and how that individual navigates such systems. Since the focus of contextual theories of transfer is not on the transfer of skills, most context-based theorists argue that knowledge transfer is a misleading term and instead focus on the idea of boundary crossing (Engestrom), knowledge building, or generalization (Beach).
The most widely used context-based theory of transfer, and one heavily drawn upon in writing studies, is activity theory. Toumi-Grohn and Engestrom describe activity theory in the following way:
The conceptualization of transfer based on socio-cultural views take into account the changing social situations and individual’s multidirectional movement from one organization to another, from home to school or from workplace to school and back. Based on activity theory, this conceptualization expands the basis of transfer from the actions of individuals to collective organizations. It’s not a matter of individual moves between school and workplace but of the efforts of school and workplace to create together new practices. (34).
As Engestrom argues, activity systems are structured to include a number of features: rules, division of labor, community, subjects, objects, instruments, and outcomes. It is through the relationship of each of the above aspects of this larger activity system that transfer can occur. Toumi-Grohn and Engestrom argue that transfer in this model is primarily driven by the interaction—and resolution of conflict—between different activity systems, such as school and work. Through “expansive learning” individuals involved in two or more activity systems will experience contradictions between the activity systems. This leads to asking questions, debating, and collaborating and, through this process, possible change in both activity systems (32). On the surface, activity theory, readily embraced by compositionists, seems to provide a solution to the challenges of understanding transfer through a cognitive approach. Unfortunately, by heavily emphasizing the context, writing researchers have overlooked dispositional aspects that we’ll argue are necessary for successful transfer to take place and that impact how an individual moves through an activity system. We now examine research concerning transfer specific to writing and examine gaps in our understanding of individual dispositions.
Research on Writing Transfer: Context and Curriculum
Writing researchers, many of whom are WPAs, have primarily emphasized and embraced two related areas: understanding writing transfer from a socially-situated, activity-theory perspective and placing the impetus of writing transfer in curricular design decisions. David Russell’s 1995 chapter, “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction” is frequently cited by composition scholars in order to describe the limitations of first-year composition (FYC) in facilitating knowledge transfer. Using a “general ball” metaphor, Russell explains why “General Writing Skills Instruction” (GSWI) courses (i.e., FYC) fail to teach students to generalize from those courses to the others in the university. He equates a GWSI course to a course in general ball handling, where students learn how to hold the ball, bounce the ball, throw the ball, etc., but don’t learn those skills inside of the context where they would actually use them (baseball, football, basketball etc.). Russell argues that students can’t transfer “general ball” to the disciplines, and suggests that we encourage more WID and WAC writing instruction.
While activity theory seems to offer a multitude of ways of viewing transfer, in practice, it seems as if compositionists have used activity theory frameworks to focus primarily on the instructional contexts at the expense understanding role of the learner, as we’ll demonstrate through the work of three influential works published in 2007: Smit, Beaufort, and Wardle. In The End of Composition Studies, David Smit devotes a chapter to the issue of transfer and writing. Smit argues that the research, thus far, has now allowed us to understand how transfer occurs: “…we cannot say much about this phenomenon except that it indeed occurs. That is, we know little about the mental processes involved and can generalize very little from what we can observe…The only principle we have is that transfer can be taught if the similarities of the knowledge and skill needed in different contexts are pointed out”(132). Like Russell, he critiques FYC for being a place where writing is taught as a set of isolated skills and FYC is divorced from the contexts where students will need to use writing skills. Smit places his primary concern on how educators can either make the contexts of their classrooms similar enough for students to be able to generalize from one to another, or how to the similarities that do exist more transparent (as his quote above indicates).While he acknowledges that transfer in large part “depends on the learners’ background and experience,” he dismisses these factors because he says teachers cannot control them (p. 119).Smit argues that first-year composition students often do not see how what they have learned in the past is relevant to the future, but he does not explore why they think that.So although Smit does an admirable job describing challenges for transfer in the context of curriculum and classrooms, he fails to address—or even acknowledge—the individual aspects that help students fail or succeed.
Similarly, Anne Beaufort’s work, College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction, is devoted to the question of transfer. Through her ethnographic case study of one student, Beaufort follows Tim as he struggles in moving from FYC to his coursework in two majors and finally into the workplace. Beaufort grounds her research in a context-based framework, discourse community theory, which has features in common with activity theory but is more specific to literate practice. Beaufort finds that Tim had trouble transferring writing knowledge because of the competing values in Tim’s different discourse communities (FYC and History) and his lack of awareness about the differences between those discourse communities (p. 66-68). Beaufort’s study focuses on Tim’s perceptions of his discourse communities, but does not examine any intrapersonal aspects of Tim which may be causing those perceptions (such as locus of control). Like Smit, Beaufort’s arguments are based not on individual characteristics of students, but on curricular interventions on the part of faculty. In her concluding sections, Beaufort critiques the context in which first-year writing is taught and argues that many teachers of writing consider themselves “generalists” who are more concerned with providing students with basic skills than with how their class fits into the context of the university or how their class will support the students in their academic careers. Drawing on Russell’s ball analogy, she challenges the idea that teaching students basic writing skills will automatically enable the students to transfer their knowledge to new settings. Since writing standards are “largely cultural and socially specific,” Beaufort suggests that if both teachers of freshman writing and experts in their disciplinary fields could give students “the kind of intellectual tools and frameworks for being able to become astute at learning to be flexible writers” then students would effectively be taught how to learn (p. 15). Beaufort’s model and interpretation again place the emphasis—and issues—primarily in the “context” domain through interventions on the part of faculty and curriculum.
Like Smit and Beaufort, Elizabeth Wardle’s article “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study” can be seen both as a product of the activity theory as well as the beginning of a new genealogy which eventually leads to the current scholarship on the “Writing About Writing” curriculum (described in Downs and Wardle). Wardle also addresses the limitations of trying to understand the role of the individual in the problem of transfer. Unlike Smit, she doesn’t think that students’ experiences are not useful because they are not controllable, but rather that researchers would miss crucial information if they only focused on the individual without understanding the learning context. Additionally, Wardle argues that by focusing on the individual, “we may be tempted to assign some ‘deficiency’ to students or their previous training though in fact the students may fulfill the objectives of their next writing activities satisfactorily without using specific previously-learned writing-related skills (such as revision)” (p. 69). Despite these concerns, Wardle’s context-rich findings we interpret as having much to do with intrapersonal aspects of learning. Wardle found that, generally, students didn’t transfer knowledge from their first-year writing courses, “not because they are unable to or because they did not learn anything in FYC. Rather, students did not perceive a need to adopt or adapt most of the writing behaviors they used in FYC for other courses” (p. 76). She explains that while the students felt they were capable of completing more difficult assignments, they were “unwilling to put forth the effort required” to reflect on their past learning enough to use what they had learned to solve these more difficult writing problems (p. 74). Wardle’s study, and subsequent emphasis on writing about writing, leads to a number of questions about the individual motivations, beliefs about writing, self-efficacy, and other individual issues that my have contributed to students’ challenges with transfer.