Resources, Framing, and Transfer Resources, Framing, and Transfer

As researchers studying student reasoning in introductory physics, and as instructors teaching courses, we often focus on whether and how students apply what they know in one context to their reasoning in another. But we do not speak in terms of “transfer.” The term connotes to us a unitary view of knowledge as a thing that is acquired in one context and carried (or not) to another. We speak, rather, in terms of activating resources, a language with an explicitly manifold view of cognitive structure. In this chapter, we describe this view and argue that it provides a more firm and generative basis for research. In particular, our resources-based perspective accounts for why it is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to draw a boundary around the notion of “transfer”; provides an analytical framework for exploring the differences between active transfer involving metacognition and passive transfer that “just happens”; helps to explain many results in the transfer literature, such as the rarity of certain kinds of transfer and the ubiquity of others; and provides an ontological underpinning for new views of transfer such as Bransford, Schwartz, and Sears’ (this issue) “preparation for future learning.”