KNOWLEDGE TELLING AND TRANSFFERING STRATEGIES

Knowledge Telling and Transferring Strategies

Knowledge Telling and Transferring Strategies

Introduction

Knowledge telling and transfer is the integration of knowledge, skills and attitudes; coordinating qualitatively different constituent skills; and often transferring what was learned in school or training to daily life and work. There are many examples of theoretical design models that have been developed to promote complex learning: cognitive apprenticeship, instructional episodes, collaborative problem solving, constructivism and constructivist learning environments, learning by doing, multiple approaches to understanding, star legacy as well as the subject of this contribution, the Four-Component Instructional Design model (Mayer, 2004). These approaches all focus on authentic learning tasks as the driving force for teaching and learning because such tasks are instrumental in helping learners to integrate knowledge, skills, and attitudes (often referred to as competences), stimulate the coordination of skills constituent to solving problems or carrying out tasks, and facilitate the transfer of what has been learned to new and often unique tasks and problem situations (Klahr, 2006).

Though the first two goals are essential for education and training and should not be underestimated, the fundamental problem facing instructional designers is education and training's apparent inability to achieve the third goal, the transfer of learning. Instructional design (ID) theory needs to support the design and development of programs that will help students acquire and transfer professional competencies or complex cognitive skills to an increasingly varied set of real-world contexts and settings (Dewey, 2008). The Ten Steps to Complex Learning approach to ID claims that a new ID approach is needed to reach this goal. In the next section, this holistic design approach is presented.

Holistic Design

Holistic design is the opposite of atomistic design where complex contents and tasks are usually reduced to their simplest or smallest elements. This reduction is such that contents and tasks are continually reduced to a level where they can easily be transferred to learners through a combination of presentation (i.e., expository teaching) and practice (Chi, 2007). This approach works very well if there are few interactions between those elements, but often fails when the elements are closely interrelated because here the whole is much more than the sum of its separate parts. Holistic design approaches to learning deal with complexity without losing sight of the separate elements and the interconnections between them. Using such an approach solves three common problems in education, namely, compartmentalization, fragmentation, and the transfer paradox (Chen, 2008).

The analyses of cognitive strategies and mental models are necessary for learners to achieve the nonrecurrent aspects of carrying out the task. The analysis of cognitive strategies answers the question, How do proficient task performers systematically approach problems in the task domain? The analysis of mental models answers the question, How is the domain organized? The resulting systematic approaches to problem solving and domain models are used as a basis for the design of supportive information for a particular task class (Bruner, 2008).

The analyses of cognitive rules and prerequisite knowledge are necessary for learners to achieve the recurrent aspects of carrying ...