Toward an Integrated Model of Writing Transfer: The Impact ...



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-Based |

|Definition of Transfer |“The application of knowledge learned in one |“The personal construction of relations of |

| |situation to a new situation.” |similarity across activities (i.e., seeing |

| | |situations as the same).” |

|Research Method |Measuring “improved performance on tasks” |Examining “the influence of prior activity on |

| |primarily through experimental design |current activity and how actors construe |

| | |situations as similar”. Measuring primarily |

| | |through context-based case studies. |

|Research Questions |“Was transfer obtained? What conditions |“What relations of similarity are created? How |

| |facilitate transfer?” |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.

Bridging the Gap: Contextual Learning and Individual Dispositions

The question of the importance of intrapersonal aspects of student learning has been implicit, but not explicit, in the work of the scholars above. Earlier work, by McCarthy and Herrington, likewise, examined writing in disciplinary courses, where student perceptions of their learning environment seem to be the primary barrier toward transfer. The work of Bergmann and Zepernick was one of the first to place an emphasis on the connection between some intrapersonal characteristics (namely, student beliefs and attitudes) and transfer of learning. Bergmann and Zepernick conducted focus groups with upper-division students on their perceptions of FYC. They write, “The attitudes expressed by our respondents suggest that the primary obstacle to such transfer is not that students are unable to recognize situations outside FYC in which those skills can be used, but that students fail to look for such situations because they believe that skills learned in FYC in particular have no value in any other setting” (p. 139). What their work suggests is that characteristics unique to individual students (values, perceptions, self-efficacy) are as important as instructional contexts within an activity system. These arguments closely align with the work of Bereiter, who argues for a disposional view of transfer, or the ability of learners to be able to transfer dispositions, or ways of approaching new tasks (p. 24).

We’ve been using the term “disposition” to describe intrapersonal, cognitive aspects of learners that our own research has found to impact successful transfer. In defining this term, we draw upon the work of Perkins et. al, who argue that dispositions are not abilities that students have (like knowledge or skills) but rather how sensitive students are to be motivated and incluined to use what they have in learning situations. McCune and Entwistle, describing a particular “desire to learn” disposition, argue that dispositsions are associated with particular ways of thinking, ways students approach material, willingness to engage with the subject matter (305). Dispositions are not static; learners develop particular dispositions as they move through activity systems. Perkins et. al. argue that researchers often try to explain intelligent behavior in terms of skills, knowledge or aptitude, rather than dispositions; and yet dispositions can greatly help explain the behaviors learning researchers witness.

Our two independent studies on writing transfer confirm the arguments that Perkins and his colleagues make concerning the importance of dispositsions and using disposition as a framework to better understand behaviors. Our studies demonstrate that several key dispositional areas impact writing transfer: motivation, student beliefs and attitudes, metacognition, self-efficacy, attribution, and self-regulation.

Expectancy-Value Theory of Motivation, Student Beliefs, and Metacognition: An Examination of First- Year Writers During and After FYC

The work of the first author of this piece (Dana Driscoll) has closely examined the issue of value and how it relates to student knowledge, perception, and motivation to transfer writing knowledge from FYC to other contexts. My work drew heavily upon the expectancy-value theory of motivation (Wingfeld and Eccles; Eccles) which links student motivation, performance, persistence, and choice-making in educational environments directly to the value students place upon a particular task or learning situation. I linked expectancy-value theory with the work of Perkins and Salomon, who argue that for high road, or more advanced transfer to happen, learners must be able to engage in willful “mindful abstraction.” Mindful abstraction is the metacognitive, mental effort and willingness to generalize from past learning to new learning situations. Without value, students generally will not engage in mindful abstraction and, as her study demonstrated, fail to see situations in which transfer of knowledge can occur.

To demonstrate these connections, I presented a mixed-methods study of eight classrooms, including pre- and post surveys from 135 first-year writers, follow-up interviews with 15 students the semester following their FYC course, class observations of all sections, and a collection of student writing. Through this data, I discovered that “value” for students was almost entirely based on their beliefs about future writing contexts (Salomon and Perkins’ forward- reaching knowledge) and how well students could link FYC learning to those perceived future contexts. Based on this finding, I placed students into four groups based on their knowledge of future writing contexts. These groups are: explicitly connected students who valued FYC and saw direct connections to future writing contexts; implicitly connected students who saw writing as a whole as valuable but were unable to point to any specifics; uncertain students who were uncertain of writing in their futures, and disconnected students who either saw no connection between FYC and future writing or saw the writing tasks as entirely separate. How students fit within these categories impacted their perceptions of transfer, the value they placed on FYC and writing, and their motivations to develop mindful abstraction. Since this original study, I have been engaged in extensive longitudinal research at a new institution and am again finding the same four types of student beliefs concerning transfer.

As part of this work, I argued that within a learning setting, there is a distinction between what teachers present in a classroom, what students perceive they are teaching, and how this exchange is influenced by dispositional characteristics, especially in the value that students place on tasks. Often, this exchange is brought about based on what students “carry with them” in what Petragllgia calls a general writing skills instruction (GWSI) classroom rather than what is learned within that classroom. I found that the value students placed on tasks directly impacted their perceptions of transfer, and since most transfer requires mindful abstraction and paying attention in meaningful ways to connections, students often struggled in seeing those connections. In other words, I argue that we must consider dispositional characteristics in any larger emphasis on curricular change. I worked to provide a model that demonstrated the interaction between the student, instructor, and learning environment concerning motivation, value, beliefs, and other intrapersonal factors.

A second area that my work lead to was examining the role of metacognition and emphasis on building metacognitive awareness. Metacognition, also known as “learning about learning,” is a cognitive strategy that students can be taught that can drastically increase their success in transferring learning to new classroom and non-classroom contexts(National Research Council, How People Learn, 2003). According to Schraw and Dennison (1994), mMetacognition has two main components in a learning environment: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. Knowledge of cognition is what we know: it includes knowledge of our skills and abilities, knowledge of how to implement learning strategies, and knowledge of when and why we should use particular learning strategies. It also includes regulation of cognition, or our ability to plan, manage information, monitor, debug (solve problems with learning), and evaluate our learning goals. As we’ll argue below, metacognition is critical to successful transfer.

Self-Efficacy, Attribution, and Self-Regulation: An Examination of Students Transferring Knowledge from High School to College

The work of the second author (Jennifer Wells) adds additional evidence that demonstrates that writing researchers need to pay more attention to intrapersonal aspects of learning to write. I followed a group of high school students graduating from an affluent, college preparatory high school as they worked to transfer literacy skills to college. After surveying students at the end of their high school careers (N=52), I was able to follow 22 of them as they entered college and engaged in literacy tasks throughout their first year.

Overall, I found signs that transfer of learning of literacy skills from high school to college were successful, but largely mitigated by a number of dispositional factors, including self-efficacy, attribution, and self-regulation. Self-efficacy is defined as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce performances that influence events affecting their lives” (Bandura, 1995, p. 434). High self- efficacy is linked to positive performances in writing (McCarthy, Meier, and Rinderer, 19851995), regulation of learning (Bandura, 1977) and persistence (Zimmerman, 2002). I found that students who had more self-efficacy were able to better regulate the increased demands of college literacy practices (118). Attribution theory (Weiner, 2010), is a theory about to whom or to what people attribute the causes of events that affect them. These attributions are sometimes referred to as a person’s “locus of control.” When an individual believes that their ability or efforts are the cause of their success or failure, they are considered to have a high internal locus of control. On the other hand, when an individual believes that the cause of their success or failure lies outside of their control, they are considered to have a high external locus of control. Those who believe outcomes are completely in their control may suffer from a loss of self-esteem (Abramson, Garber, & Seligman, 1980). I discovered that some students who did poorly in literacy tasks who had an external locus of control blamed their challenges on their faculty.

A third intrapersonal factor, self-regulation, also impacted student success in transferring knowledge in my study. According to Zimmerman (2002), self-regulation is not an inherent trait that learners either have or don’t have, but rather it is a process learners go through when they choose how they will adapt to new learning situations. It includes goal setting, strategies for goal achievement, self-evaluation, time management, reflection on choices, and managing physical and social settings. It is a substantial challenge for students as Zimmerman comments, “It is hardly surprising that many students have not learned to self-regulate their academic studying very well” (p. 64). For students to do so would mean they would have to be self-aware, self-motivated, and have control over their own behaviors. In my participants, I again found that self-regulation played a key factor in students’ success in navigating college literacy practices.

I concluded my study by arguing that dispositional characteristics, including the three described above, impacted myher study participants’ ability to successfully transfer knowledge and navigate the challenging literacy tasks in their first year of college. I discovered that in addition to impacting high-school to college transitions and transfer, these dispositions also acted as “conduits” or “canals” upon which participants were able to move their knowledge, both content and procedural, from high school to college tasks (167). These conduits or canals feature prominently in our model, described in the next section.

Modeling Transfer

What our two independent studies, both conducted longitudinally at different locations and with different student populations, demonstrate is that students’ dispositions matter. In fact, we argue that they may matter so much that they are one of the keys to understanding successful writing transfer. Driscoll’s study showed the relationship between deep-rooted (and yet often unsubstantiated) beliefs about writing, motivation, and willingness to engage in transfer and mindful abstraction. Wells demonstrated that self-efficacy, attribution, and self-regulation provided the mechanism through which literacy transfer was facilitated—or hindered—forfrom students transitioning from high school to college. As our two studies and work from a variety of other scholars have suggested, transfer of learning is heavily dependent upon dispositional factors that ultimately facilitate or impede successful transfer. Some of these factors, like student perceptions of future writing contexts, are things we can address in the classroom and can be shifted through curricular changes. But many other factors rarely see emphasis in college-level writing instruction. These are the things students carry, the invisible tools or baggage that students bring with them, and that constantly impact every aspect of their ability to move between activity systems and successfully transfer writing knowledge to new contexts.

The Dispositional Model of Transfer

In order to describe our model in action, we have created two “composite” students, based on students in our two studies: Edward and Lisanne. Through Edward and Lisanne’s experiences, we’ll model how a context-based approach is insufficient in addressing the differences in performance and why dispositional aspects of students matter.

Edward and Lisanne are both sophomores enrolled in the same Philosophy class, Introduction to Ethics. Edward is a psychology major. Prior to college, Edward took many AP classes in high school and scored highly on the SAT. He is confident about his writing abilities, and feels that he can write better under pressure, at the last minute. Edward wants to get to his major as quickly as possible, and so over the past two summers he has taken several general education courses at a community college near his parents’ house, including his FYC course, English 1A. He wants to get them “out of the way” as quickly as possible.

Lisanne is on track to declare herself a nursing major. She has wanted to become a nurse for as long as she can remember; in her culture, she explains, that’s just what you do. Lisanne enjoyed and excelled in her math and science courses in high school, and has continued to do so in college. She admittedly struggles with her writing, and she recalls some harsh comments from her teachers over the years to support her struggles. Lisanne didn’t take a specific writing course in college, but rather met her first year writing requirement through her enrollment in a thematically connected “core” sequence.

Edward and Lisanne’s philosophy professor has asked the class to write a comparison and contrast between the views of Aristotle and Cicero on ethics. Ultimately, it will be Lisanne who successfully communicates her ideas clearly in writing, and Edward who does not.

Context-based theories of transfer that attempt to explain the differences in performance between these two students would guide the researcher’s gaze toward the Philosophy classroom itself and toward both Edward and Lisanne’s prior learning contexts. From this perspective, one could argue, as Beaufort did, that the philosophy assignment was divorced from the philosophy discourse community, and that the professor was not explicit in his expectations. Other arguments could be lodged against the English 1A context, in which Edward practiced his “GWSI” skills (as Russell would argue), or against Lisanne’s core class for its lack of explicit writing instruction and de-emphasis on writing as the subject of a class (as Downs and Wardle may argue).

While all of these critiques are likely valid, the difference in contexts does not adequately explain why Lisanne is more successful and Edward is less so. In order to get a more complete understanding, the researcher needs to understand their dispositions, including attitudes and beliefs and how those translate into motivation and action.

Edward is motivated to do well in college insofar as he perceives what he is doing to be useful or interesting. When he feels that something he is learning has no obvious connection to his future, he halfheartedly plays the academic game and isn’t too upset when he earns a grade that would have been unacceptable to him in high school. Edward has also had a harder time adjusting to the freedom of college in that he, like many students, struggles with managing his time. He feels that he writes best under pressure, and will often leave writing assignments to the last minute. For many years, this worked well for him. Edward’s attitude toward the philosophy paper is dismissive: he doesn’t see how it will apply to his future career in psychology, but he is confident he can pull an all nighter because his writing is pretty good. So because of this, Edward suffers motivational challenges as he has placed a low value on the philosophy paper and associated course.

Lisanne she is motivated to do well in college, and also believes that it is her responsibility to do so. While she is focused on nursing, she knows that she will need to be able to communicate in writing. She also knows that ethics are a topic that comes up frequently in her health sciences classes, and while she isn’t sure of the connection between this class and those real world problems, she is open to it. She compensates for what she perceives as her lack of innate writing ability by self-regulating her time and starting her essays well in advance of when they are due. She chooses to regularly attend her professors’ office hours, and she usually brings them a paragraph of an essay she is working on to find out if she is on the right track. Even though she is not confident in her writing ability, she relies strongly on procedures she learned in previous writing classes, like how to create an outline and how to integrate facts into an essay without just dropping them in. In many ways, Lisanne is motivated by her perceived weaknesses to think of what she has learned before and to seek clarification and feedback. Because she is able to connect the work in Philosophy to her future coursework in Nursing, Lisanne places a higher value on the course and is more motivated to complete it.

As our model will describe below, once the fuller scope of Edward and Lisanne’s beliefs and attitudes is revealed it is not hard to see why Lisanne was more successful than Edward. Lisanne had knowledge of strategies for organizing her ideas that she was able to use in her philosophy paper. She chose to spend time working on her paper when she could have been watching TV with her roommate. Lisanne went to her philosophy professor’s office hours to ask him to clarify his expectations for the assignment. Through those meetings, Lisanne gained a better understanding philosophical writing and a clearer understanding of what her professor expected, especially when he used words like analysis that helped trigger her memory.

In discussions of transfer, it is imperative to keep in mind that learners always arrive at new learning situations with baggage. They have: “declarative knowledge” (also called content knowledge) which is knowing that (e.g., knowing that a topic sentence is the first one in a paragraph); “procedural knowledge,” which is knowing how (e.g., knowing how to revise a topic sentence to fit the paragraph); “dispositions,” which are beliefs and attitudes that influence a learners actions (e.g., a learner is motivated so she persists and keeps revising her topic sentence); and “processing capacity,” or cognitive ability (McKeough, Lupart, & Marini, 1995, p. 3). In order to more fully capture how an individual’s dispositions affect their ability to successfully transfer knowledge from one context to another, and to describe the experiences of Edward and Lisanne, we have created a metaphor which we use to explain the Dispositional Model of Writing Transfer.

In our metaphor, there is a launching point, a canal, and a target destination. The launching point represents the moment at which a learner reaches back in their memory to recall knowledge (both content and procedural) they need to successfully gain new knowledge as they move to a new context. The target destination is the new learning context, which includes tools, activities, rules, etc. In between the prior context, the launching point, and the new learning context, the target destination, is a canal, which represents a learner’s dispositions, and on top of the canal is a boat.

We chose the concept of a canal because canals are used specifically to transport goods from one location to another, and we cannot underscore enough how essential the individual’s dispositions are in the transportation of knowledge from one context to the other. The canal represents the dispositions the individual learner possesses at the time the learner is in entering into the new context. These dispositions act as a conduit between prior learning contexts and new learning contexts. When a student has positive dispositions, including a good sense of self-efficacy, an internal locus of control, the ability to self-regulate their own behaviors, and good motivation, their dispositions act as a deep canal with strong currents that will carry the boat of metacognition easily from one side to the other; a shallower canal with weak currents moves the boat, but the boat may get caught up in sludge. The quality of the canal determines how easily and forcefully the metacognitive boat will be able to move between the launching point and the target destination.

On top of the canal water, the boat represents the user’s metacognition. The relationship between the canal and the boat of metacognition is this: without the strong dispositions, the learner will be less likely to engage in the “mindful abstraction” that Salomon and Perkins argue is essential for transfer. Metacognition doesn’t occur in a vacuum, but rather must be prompted into being by the learner’s own dispositions as well as the learner’s instructional context. A student’s ability and willingness to self-regulate, to choose to reflect on past learning, will help or inhibit the boat’s movement. Likewise, a student’s belief in their own ability to achieve their desired outcomes and their belief that they have some control over those outcomes is more likely to cause the student to fill their metacognitive boat with the content and/or procedural knowledge from their prior learning and move it across to the new learning context. A student’s belief in the expected value of the new learning context will help facilitate the movement of the metacognitive boat from one shore to the other; a student’s lack of belief in the expected value of the new learning context will usually not motivate the student to be metacognitive.

The metacognitive boat contains the knowledge that the individual is transporting from the launching point to the target destination. Our model delineates between types of knowledge ,procedural and content,(as described above).

Just as dispositions and types of knowledge affect the likelihood of successful transfer between the launching point and any target destination, so, too, have dispositions affected every learning situation the individual has experienced prior to the one in question. Therefore, we also represent this in our model by indicating the launching point has been arrived at, and shaped, through past learning experiences, which were in turn shaped by the individual’s dispositions and knowledge.

How the Model Fits with Context-Based Approaches

We want to emphasize that we are not advocating the abandonment of context-based views of transfer but rather arguing that a better understanding of the dispositional aspects can help us more fully understand challenges of writing transfer. Theories, such as activity theory and discourse community theory, provide us with excellent frameworks for understanding the larger system in which individuals operate—but pieces of that puzzle, as we have argued above—are missing. What we are instead arguing for, in Activity Theory terms, is an expansion of the “Subject” area of an activity system to include the dispositions that an individual brings to the learning environment. These aspects, developed over time in a social context, are internalized and brought with students as they travel through activity systems. As our model argues, these individual characteristics are always impacting an individual’s reaction to the external environment and impetus to engage in activities that would facilitate transfer.

Using the Model to Examine Previous Literature

The model presented here may also help better represent previous findings concerning writing transfer. A re-examination of previous work using the model, including the work of Wardle and Beaufort shows that in many of the situations where students failed to transfer, the individual dispositions had a substantial role. Although framed by an activity theory lens, Wardle describes many dispositional features in her study, such as the students’ relationship between the effort they placed on writing tasks and the value they placed on the task, including the value of a good grade (73-74) or the lack of motivation in courses (74). And while Wardle is absolutely correct in saying that the larger activity system of school did not challenge students in ways that required them to transfer learning from FYC, we can also clearly see these internalized dispositional features at work (and dispositional features that are a product of both internal student factors and a larger educational system).

Likewise, Beaufort also largely blames inadequate instruction for the lack of progress Tim had in history writing in his three years as a history major. Beaufort emphasizes three areas: the lack of feedback on his history writing, the lack of a scaling difficulty in earlier and later courses in the assignment sequence, and a lack of clarity concerning the purpose and genre of writing tasks (103). In her conclusion of the history chapter, however, Beaufort describes dispositional features (labeled “Negative Transfer”) that impacted Tim’s writing progress. One feature is locus of control, where Tim’s blaming his failure in understanding the “essay” on teacher’s limitations in understanding, rather than his own knowledge of history (104). Similarly, in her chapter on engineering, in interview segments Tim describes metacognitive awareness (114) and self regulation of learning (114, 129), and self efficacy (114, 116). How much these dispositional aspects impact Tim and his learning in history and engineering are unclear from Beaufort’s text, but they are clearly contributing to Tim’s ability to transfer, as revealed through his interview segments. In both of the cases above, an expanded analysis using a disposition lens may have lead to additional insight into these students’ struggles to transfer learning effectively.

Conclusion

In her 2007 article, Wardle argues that by turning our attention solely to individuals, we may inadvertently assign some kind of “deficiency” to students in prior learning (69). But in this piece, we argue that by focusing so heavily on the contextual and instruction context, we are failing to see the larger picture of transfer and failing to address the relationship between individuals, dispositions, and contexts. To demonstrate the efficacy of our model, we’ve presented results from two independent studies, examined previous work, and showed how two composite students’ success or failures to transfer are impacted by their dispositions. As we have considered the role of dispositions in the transfer of learning, we identify a number of questions for future study, including: how are dispositions that impact transfer formed? Can we teach students in a way that forms transfer-oriented dispositions? Are dispositions static, or do they also depend on the activity system that a learner inhabits? What is the relationship between individual dispositions (self-efficacy, locus of control, etc.)? We encourage writing researchers to consider the role of dispositions on the transfer of learning; likewise, we encourage teachers to consider addressing dispositional aspects in their classrooms.

Works Cited

Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction. . Utah: Utah State UP, 2007. Print.

Council, National Research. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. . Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. Print.

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. "Teaching About Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning "First-Year Composition" as "Introduction to Writing Studies"." College Composition and Communication 58.4 (2007): 552-84. Print.

Haskell, Robert E. Transfer of Learning: Cognition and Instruction. New York: Academic Press, 2000. Print.

Herrington, Anne J. "Writing in Academic Settings: A Study of the Context for Writing in Two College Chemical Engineering Courses." Research in the Teaching of English 19 (1985): 331-61. Print.

McKeough, Anne, Judy Lee Lupart, and Anthony Marini. Teaching for Transfer: Fostering Generalization in Learning. Mawah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Print.

Perkins, David, and Gavriel Salomon. "The Science and Art of Transfer". 1990. .

Royer, James M., Jose P. Mestre, and Robert J. Dufresne. Introduction: Framing the Transfer Problem. . Transfer of Learning: Research and Perspectives. Ed. Mestre, Jose P. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2005. Print.

Russell, David. "Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction." Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. Ed. Petraglia, J. 51-78: Hillsdale, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995. Print.

Perkins, D. N., & Tishman, S. (2001). Dispositional aspects of intelligence. In J. M. Collis & S. Messick (Eds.), Intelligence and Personality (pp. 233−258). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lobato, J. (2003). How Design Experiments Can Inform a Rethinking of Transfer and Vice Versa. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 17-20.

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