TRANSFER PRESENTATION

Transfer is also enhanced by instruction that helps students represent problems at higher levels of abstraction. For example, students who create a specific business plan for a complex problem may not initially realize that their plan works well for “fixed cost” situations but not for others. Helping students represent their solution strategies at a more general level can help them increase the probability of positive transfer and decrease the degree to which a previous solution strategy is used inappropriately (negative transfer).

Advantages of abstract problem representation have been studied in the context of algebra word problems involving mixtures. Some students were trained with pictures of the mixtures and other students were trained with abstract tabular representation that highlighted the underlying mathematical relationship (Singley and Anderson,1989). Student who were trained on specific task components without being provided with the principles underlying the problems could do the specific tasks well, but they could not apply their learning to new problems.

By contrast, the students who received abstract training showed transfer to new problems that involved analogous mathematical relations. Research has also shown that developing a suite of representations enables learners to think flexibly about complex domains(Spiro et al., 1991).

--oOo— The author is SST I at San Vicente National High School, San Vicente, Lubao