LibLog

July 13, 2006

Transference
By Bob Connor - The Teagle Foundation

podcast

“Transference” is the technical term in higher-education-speak for the ability to apply patterns of thought from one topic to another. Sounds simple? No way! Some people I know think there’s no transference from one domain to another. Maybe, they say, you can transfer the thought patterns used in reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnet to, let’s say, a poem by Baudelaire, but that’s it. They don’t work outside the literary domain. Similarly for history, or the analysis of music and art, or any field for that matter.

If they are right, so much for old fashioned ideas of liberal education, which depend to a large extent on the claim that the best undergraduate preparation for a doctor or a lawyer or a citizen is to study the liberal arts and sciences. So some other colleagues assume s that in some way the mental habits developed by studying mathematics or ancient Greek or Chinese history will nimbly leap from one area to another, and thereby help people in understanding things very far from these domains.

Who’s right? And if we believe in transference, does it happen more or less automatically or does the teacher have to use special techniques to help it happen? Those questions made me especially interested in the third chapter of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition, a publication of the National Research Council (National Academy Press, Washington DC, 2000, also available online at www.nap.edu). It turns out that transference does take place, yes, even between quite distinct domains, provided there is real overlap between those domains. The overlap, however, doesn’t have to be in subject matter; it’s more important that it exist at a cognitive level. That is, knowledge in the two domains has to have similar cognitive elements. (This is an amateur’s summary of pp. 63 – 65 of How People Learn; don’t rely on my paraphrase; read the chapter and make sure your graduate students read it.)

What’s more, to make transference really work both teacher and student have to see the similarity in those cognitive elements. The way knowledge is mapped or represented is extremely important, because transference doesn’t just happen. Students have to understand that it is a goal of their learning, and they often have to be helped to see that the underlying structure of one situation is similar to that of another.

I especially liked the inset example on p. 64 of How People Learn. College students were asked to read a story about how a general conquered an enemy city. They were then asked to come up with a solution to a problem in radiation treatment of a tumor. Very few students were able to solve the problem. But when they were told, explicitly, to use the story about the general in order to solve the radiation problem, 90 percent of them saw the solution. The underlying cognitive structures were similar but the ability to see such similarities hadn’t as yet been developed, even among bright college students.

Verbum sapienti satis. The word to the wise in this case is “Be Explicit.” One can’t assume that transference is going to take place, automatically, magically, just by studying a subject. If we make the wrong assumption, knowledge will remain sequestered in one domain, never enriching or enlightening other parts of one’s life or thought. So, if a goal of a course is developing students’ ability to see underlying similarities in ostensibly disparate material, then one needs to be explicit about it. Ditto for individual episodes or problems studied in the course. There’s more to it than that, of course, but you get the point: transference is at the core of liberal education; understanding how to achieve it is now within reach thanks to the new knowledge reported in How People Learn. That’s one more example of our increasing knowledge about how to teach more effectively, and one more variation of the recurring challenge: if we value knowledge, we have to use it.

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