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Teachers’ beliefs about students’ transfer of learning

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Abstract

The idea that formal learning generalizes, or is transferred, beyond the conditions of initial learning serves as a basis for our educational system. That is, educators hope students will use the learning that develops in the classroom to productively reason about situations they have yet to encounter. Researchers in psychology and mathematics education have been conducting systematic investigations of students’ transfer of learning since the beginning of the twentieth century. However, we still do not know how teachers, the people typically tasked with creating the classroom contexts within which student learning is fostered, think about this phenomenon. This study, thus, addressed the following question: What are teachers’ beliefs about students’ transfer of learning? In the present study, I interviewed 8 practicing teachers twice using instructional tasks related to slope and identified 6 categories of beliefs they exhibited about students’ transfer of learning. These categories extend current conceptualizations of transfer into the domain of mathematics education, represent beliefs that have yet to be articulated by transfer researchers, and provide a foundation on which mathematics teacher educators can begin to think about how to effectively support teachers in developing students who can make productive use of their classroom learning.

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Notes

  1. During the initial observations described on the next page, both verbal statements (e.g., “I want students to know how to transfer their knowledge and problem solve in the real world”) and enacted practices (e.g., Asking students, “Where might you use this in your life?”) were taken as indications that teachers concerned themselves with transfer.

  2. I use pseudonyms for all participants in this study.

  3. As part of a larger study, a subset of the teacher participants were observed carrying out their lesson plans. The results of the analyses of those data are not presented here.

  4. Additional details regarding the nature of the relationship between the teachers’ beliefs about transfer and their MKT (Silverman and Thompson 2008) can be found in Diamond (2013)

  5. Teachers’ beliefs are not rank ordered. Thus, teachers’ second belief is no less important or strongly held than their first belief.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jessica Bishop, Amy Ellis, Andrew Izsák, and Steve Oliver for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Department of Mathematics and Science Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602-7124, USA

    Jaime Marie Diamond

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Diamond, J.M. Teachers’ beliefs about students’ transfer of learning. J Math Teacher Educ 22, 459–487 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-018-9400-z

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