Jay McTighe and I drafted a summary paper on the subject of transfer goals – what they are, how to write them, examples of them, etc.
You can get a free copy of the paper Transfer Goals Clarification Feb 2012 by clicking on the link.
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I teach physics in 9th grade an am looking at something called goal-less problems. In these situations, the student is given a situation, but is not expressly asked to find one answer. Instead they are asked:
A:) determine what model fits the situation and why
B:) draw, diagram, and graph the situation as many ways as possible
C:) find as many interesting quantities as you can from your diagrams and graphs
Does this follow what you would see as appropriate transfer processes?
I am planning on showing how I would do it.
Have the students do some and then share what they did in a dialog session.
Do one or two goal less problems for a non graded assessment.
Share a few more . . . and finally use goal less problems in lieu of a standard learning goal based assessment (where many teachers always seem to put student applications to non novel situations)
By the way, did I once read that all transfer is either accommodation or assimilation? Is that right?
Jim:
This sounds just right as a transfer task – with a minor caveat.
The positives seem clear: the students have no specific goal or problem posed that would prompt recall or plugging in of prior knowledge, so you would be seeing what they bring to bear and why – with minimal scaffold or clues. My caveat would be that you need to beware that you are not unwittingly assessing creative thinking in terms of fluency of ideas generated (e.g. ‘find as many interesting quantities…’). Maybe you need to tweak the phrasing to suggest that you are looking not so much for ‘quantity’ as ‘interesting’ data, suggestive of cool underlying patterns or concepts. Because that’s the other side of transfer: generalizing from one’s learnings to bigger ideas that have transfer value going forward. So, to take a simple example: once you see that there are sinusoidal patterns in certain kinds of situations (pendulums), then you might have other data, say with light, to see how far certain patterns can go.
Great thoughts and experiments; let me know how it goes! (Have you tried any of Eric Mazur’s ConcepTests from his Peer Instruction book? They are often goal-less in the same way, but nicely focused also on typical misconceptions.)
Thanks for uploading excellent information that should help everyone understand more about transfer goals but also see the connection to standards.
Thanks for this update on what a transfer goal is. I just started reading the first chapter of “The Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High-Quality Units” and I was wondering what a transfer goal was. I’ll be adding this summary to my book for future reference.
[…] on a written test are given another option to show mastery. On another level, educators like Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe have written extensively about the idea of transfer in education. “You can only be said to […]