The influence of framing on transfer: initial evidence from a tutoring experiment

By Randi A. Engle, Phi D. Nguyen, Adam Mendelson. 2011

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the idea that the framing of learning and transfer contexts can influence students’ propensity to transfer what they have learned. We predicted that transfer would be promoted by framing contexts in an expansive manner in which students are positioned as having the opportunity to contribute to larger conversations that extend across time, places, people, and topics. A one-on-one tutoring experiment was conducted to test this hypothesis by manipulating framing as either expansive or its opposite (bounded) within a complex instructional learning ecology. We investigated the degree to which high school biology students transferred knowledge from a learning session about the cardiovascular system to a transfer-of-learning session about the respiratory system depending on framing condition. Consistent with the framing hypothesis, students in the expansive condition were generally more likely to transfer facts, a conceptual principle, and a learning strategy from one system to another.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f965a5c3d559353a4290255839ecbe4aec730b0

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In Artificial Intelligence

Randi A. Engle

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

“Noticing” as an Alternative Transfer of Learning Process (2012, background): “Framing involves bringing to bear a structure of expectations on a situation to form a sense of “what is going on” and to help guide subsequent actions ( Engle, 2006 ; Engle, Nguyen, & Mendelson, 2010 ).”
How Does Expansive Framing Promote Transfer? Several Proposed Explanations and a Research Agenda for Investigating Them (2012, methodology): “In our tutoring experiment (Engle et al., 2011), we found students transferring-in prior knowledge in ways that would be expected to enhance transfer-out.”