Learning and transfer

From the book "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School"

1. Successful transfer is determined the degree of mastery attained over the original material.

2. Transfer requires that people learn material with deep understanding rather than say memorizing facts and such.

3. Acquiring expertise takes a long time. It can take 50000-100000 hours of practice, for example, to become world-class chess master. Much of the time is spent in lesrning pattern recognition skills.

4. A training program that tries to cram too much into a short amount of time may lead to shallow learning.

5. Deliberate practice that involves active monitoring of ones's learning is important for achieving expertise. This involves practice with feedback that focuses in understanding. Feedback should be provided on the degree to which learners understand when and where and how to use the knowledge they are learning.

6. Understanding when and where to use knowledge can be taught by the use of contrasting cases.

7. Transfer is also enhanced when students can see the potential use of the knowledge to other areas or for other purposes. E.g. Students learned Logo debugging skills better when they were expected to write a user manual on debugging at the end of training.

8. Motivation is an important consideration while lesrning. Activities must be at the appropriate challenge level. Not too easy, not too hard.

9. Goal orientation plays an important role in motivation. Students with a learning orientation will be motivated by more challenging and new problems than those with a performance orientation.

10. Goal orientation may change over time and depend on the area of study. This aspec has not yet been studied.

11. Lessens are motivated when they see that their work has a social use beyond the classroom. Example, one study found that inner city kids were motivated by activities such as tutoring other children, making presentations to an outside audience, making blueprints for playhouses that were then built and donated to local schools... Contributing to their social groups and having an impact on their local communities tends to be motivating.