Bransford and Schwartz dissected research on transfer and its affordances and constraints. They provided two theories on how to consider transfer occurring. Sequestered problem solving (SPS) is a model that involves looking for transfer to occur in isolated, decontextualized environments. Here, transfer is defined as “the ability to directly apply one’s previous learning to anew setting or problem”. The opposing model, preparation for future learning (PFL) focuses on “people’s ability to learn in knowledge-rich environments”. Bransford and Schwartz claim that information presented in context, with concrete examples, can help students appreciate new knowledge and increase the chances that the information will be spontaneously used in other contexts. They also focused on an idea they termed “knowing with”, which suggests that everything we learn is tied to the context in which we learn it and the tools that are used to learn it, and that what we learn in continually influencing what we might learn in the future.
I see a strong connection here, between the ideas of PFL and “knowing with” and Pea’s theories about distributed intelligence. Pea described intelligence as not only coming from an individual engaged in an activity, but also in the tools that an individual is using to complete said activity. What we know and what we are able to accomplish cannot be decontextualized from the tools that we use. Pea suggests that education often makes people look “dumb” because they are not allowed to use resources. I look at this in the same light the difference between SPS and PFL. SPS tries to prove the learning and transfer occur in isolation, PFL says that everything we learn is tied to what we know and the tools with which we came to know it.
Pea spends some time discussing trade-offs in design. What would people consider to be the trade-offs of learning in a contextualized environment, with concrete examples? What are we not learning in this case?
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