How Does Expansive Framing Promote Transfer? Several Proposed Explanations and a Research Agenda for Investigating Them

When contexts are framed expansively, students are positioned as actively contributing to larger conversations that extend across time, places, and people. A set of recent studies provides empirical evidence that the expansive framing of contexts can foster transfer. In this article, we present five potentially complementary explanations for how expansive framing may promote transfer and outline a research agenda for further investigating them. Specifically, we propose that expansive framing may: (a) foster an expectation that students will continue to use what they learn later, which may affect the learning process in ways that can promote transfer; (b) create links between learning and transfer contexts so that prior learning is viewed as relevant during potential transfer contexts; (c) encourage learners to draw on their prior knowledge during learning, which may involve them transferring in additional examples and making generalizations; (d) make learners accountable for intelligently reporting on the specific content they have authored; and (e) promote authorship as a general practice in which students learn that their role is to generate their own solutions to new problems and adapt their existing knowledge in transfer contexts.