Education Bookcast

This episode has such huge implications that I didn't know what to call it. Efficiency and Innovation in Transfer, the actual name of the book chapter, seemed far too dry to put across the fundamental shifts in thinking about pedagogy, assessment, education research design, and cognitive theory that this article suggests (at least to me). The authors suggest that the current literature on transfer of learning has too negative a view of the possibilty of transfer, and suffers from too many internal contradictions. They propose a new perspective on transfer called Preparation for Future Learning (PFL), as opposed to the generally accepted standard which they label Sequestered Problem Solving (SPS). In short, when you ask people to solve an unfamiliar problem and grade them on whether they get the right answer (SPS), they universally do badly; but when you ask them how they would approach solving the problem, including what questions they would ask (PFL), then you get a completely different perspective - not onl