Transfer of Knowledge, Child Education about the Real World

Transferring Knowledge beyond the School Context

Although much of what children learn in school is divorced from immediate real-world application, it is hoped that some of what children learn would actually be useful to them outside of school. Unfortunately, however, there is a growing realization among educators and researchers that mastery of the school curriculum does not guarantee its use in everyday problem solving. Take, for example, the generalization of problem solving. The ability to solve two problems with comparable critical elements, but couched in different terms or contexts, is remarkably uneven.

Consider the concept of inductive logic idealized by the classic four-card task (Wason, 1968). In this task, students are asked to test a logical inference. The task starts with a person being presented with four cards placed flat down. The visible side of each card has one of the following showing: a circle, a star, a yellow surface, or a grey surface. Students are told that if one side of a card has a shape (circle or star), then the other side has a solid color surface without a shape. They are asked to name which of the four cards must be picked up to falsify the following statement: “Whenever a card has a circle on one side, it has a yellow surface on the other.”

The answer is that two cards—and only two cards—are critical to answer this question: the one with a circle (it might have a grey surface on the other side, in which case the rule would be disconfirmed); and the grey card (if it has a circle on the other side, the rule is disconfirmed). The card with the star does not need to be picked up, because finding a yellow or grey surface on its other side would tell us nothing about the truth or falsity of the statement; nor does the card with a yellow surface matter, because finding a star or circle on its other side would also be uninformative. (If you cannot see the correctness of this, then translate circles, stars, yellow, and grey into A, not A; B, and not B.) It turns out that if this same task is couched in a context more relevant to a real-world problem (e.g., circles and stars become trains and boats, and yellow and grey become cities located on train routes or on islands), students are far more likely to demonstrate correct inductive reasoning, even though the logical structure of the task remains the same. In general, research shows that when people are given the same problem in both types of contexts, there is very little relationship between their ability to solve the two problems. Knowing how well students can solve one problem is of little help in predicting how well they will solve its analogue. Many similar examples exist, including academic problems in mathematics, biology, and physics. Mastering such content in one context (e.g., a workbook example in geometry class) often does not transfer to answering the same problem in an everyday context (e.g., measuring an area for a carpet). In sum, surprisingly, a great deal of what children learn in school does not appear to transfer to similar problems outside of school.

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