Authors:

Abstract

A concern of many educators and managers is students’ ability to transfer concepts and procedures learned in school to the work environment. According to the Committee on Science (2007) the high school experience does not provide enough authentic problem-solving and project-based activities for students to be prepared mentally for the types of problems they will have to solve in the real world, or at their place of employment. When children are taught a skill, such as solving a mathematical problem, they often fail to recognize that their new skill can be used to solve a similar problem outside of school (Bereiter, 1984). In other cases, students who are skilled with certain tasks outside of school often have difficulty transferring concepts learned from these experiences (Lave, 1988; Johnson, 1997; Johnson, Dixon, Daugherty, & Lowanto, 2011) to the solving of well-structured problems in schools, such as those often found on mathematics and science tests. These findings demonstrate the inability of students to recognize the transferability of concepts learned from solving well- structured problems in the classroom to ill-structured problems faced outside of the classroom and also the transferability of concepts learned from solving ill-structured problems, similar to those encountered in the real world, to the solving of well-structured problems encountered in the classroom.

How to Cite: Dixon, R. A., & Brown, R. A. (2012). Transfer of Learning: Connecting Concepts During Problem Solving. Journal of Technology Education, 24(1), 2–17. DOI: http://doi.org/10.21061/jte.v24i1.a.1