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Articles Conference Reviews |
L.20 Knowledge TransferL.20 Knowledge Transfer: Rethinking the Research Methodology and Investigating the High School-College Transition This Saturday morning panel on transfer was well attended, particularly given its early hour (9:30 am), which seems to indicate an increasing interest in the field regarding questions of transfer. Ed Jones from Seton Hall University presented first and his primary focus in his presentation, "Activity Theory as Heuristic and Critique for Knowledge Transfer Research," was to advocate for a switch in transfer research from relying on outdated cognitive psychology models to more robust theories such as activity theory. Jones’s presentation was admittedly theory-heavy but, in person, that element was mitigated by an effective use of slides to provide the necessary background and context to the theories. The main takeaway for the audience, from my perspective, was that a switch to activity theory of distributed cognition will allow researchers looking into the question of transfer to capture and reflect on the complex questions of how the systems surrounding students influence their experiences and performance on any given task. Dana Driscoll’s presentation essentially picked up where Jones left off. In "Developing and Extending Methodologies for Studying Transfer," she shared her own research into the question of transfer where she combined the perspectives of several research paradigms and disciplines not originally designed to study writing instruction into a model with the potential to capture the unique experiences and complexities of FYC. This was another theory-heavy presentation that was greatly assisted by the use of PowerPoint slides to bridge the familiarity gap between audience and presenter. Driscoll’s model, which she shared at the end, captured three elements of the writing instruction experience: the individual context (the base knowledge and previous experiences students bring with them); the social context (the program, the instructor, and what Robert Haskell calls “the culture of transfer”); and finally the rhetorical context (including the genres, media, and technology in play in the course). The final presentation, "Millenials Strike Back: Transfer Between High School and FYC," by Jennifer Wells, added the student voice and a more directly pedagogical perspective to the theories of the previous two papers. Wells shared the preliminary results of her study following a cohort of students from a small high school in California through their first year at a variety of universities and colleges. Perhaps the most significant element of her findings was the profound influence that psycho-social factors had on the ability of these students to see the transferability of their high school writing instruction to the college environment. In other words, the emotional maturity, self-efficacy, and sense of a locus of control that each student exhibited appeared to be a determining factor in the success of their transition to college writing. Wells’s research, it seems, captures the anecdotal sense that many FYC instructors share: some students are just not ready for the demands of college. Overall, these three presentations combined the theory of transfer with the student voices in insightful ways and seemed to point to a possible way forward for those of us who are interested in continuing this emerging line of research within composition studies. |