Framing Interactions to Foster Generative Learning: A Situative Explanation of Transfer in a Community of Learners Classroom

This article develops a situative approach to explaining the transfer of learning, illustrating it using a challenging-to-explain case from a Fostering Communities of Learners classroom. The case involved a group of 5th graders who learned and then transferred a more sophisticated way of explaining species survival and endangerment despite participating in a unit in which many activities designed to foster transfer were short circuited. The explanation included 2 kinds of analyses: (a) how students participated in the learning of relevant content, and (b) how learning contexts were framed interactionally. The content analysis took a situative perspective on commonly investigated transfer mechanisms such as quality of initial learning, engagement with multiple examples, comparison between examples, and formation of generalizations. There was strong evidence for a few of these mechanisms and weak or inconclusive evidence for others. The context analysis explored 2 aspects of the relatively new hypothesis that transfer is more likely to occur when learning contexts are framed as part of a larger ongoing intellectual conversation in which students are actively involved. First, the analysis showed that the teacher worked to frame learning contexts as being temporally connected with other contexts in which the students could use what they were learning. Second, it showed that the teacher worked to frame the students as contributing members of a larger community of people interested in what they were learning about. These and other forms of framing may have encouraged the students to expect that they would be generatively using what they were learning, thus leading them to make better use of the content-based supports for transfer that were available. Thus, this study suggests that coordinating analyses of content with the framing of contexts may be a particularly fruitful approach for developing more comprehensive explanations of how and why the transfer of learning occurs.