Download Toward an Integrated Model of Writing Transfer: The Impact of the

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
Definition of
Transfer
“The application of knowledge “The personal construction of
learned in one situation to a new relations of similarity across
situation.”
activities (i.e., seeing situations
as the same).”
Research Method
Measuring “improved
Examining “the influence of prior
performance on tasks” primarily activity on current activity and
through experimental design
how actors construe situations as
similar”. Measuring primarily
through context-based case
studies.
Research Questions “Was transfer obtained? What
conditions facilitate transfer?”
Actor-Oriented / ActivityBased
“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? 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 inclined to use what they have in learning situations.
McCune and Entwistle, describing a particular “desire to learn” disposition, argue that
dispositions 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 dispositions 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 Petraglia 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), metacognition 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, 1985), 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 my 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—for 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 deemphasis 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 selfefficacy, 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 contextbased 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.
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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
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