Content area
Full text
Through a longitudinal analysis of fourteen students' writing development over five years, we explore how transfer of learning happens and fails to happen. Key findings include that while transfer occurs frequently in our study, 78% of it is invisible to students, and when knowledge is reinforced or expanded, students are more likely to transfer. This study affirms the critical importance of teaching first-year writing but also calls into question how we study, teach, and understand writing transfer.
I could almost guarantee that I'm using that knowledge from writing but that not consciously thinking like, hey, I learned this style, I learned strategy in [Composition II] but it's probably that.
-Ron (Year 3), Biology major
While speaking about a 300-level biology assignment, Ron illustrates a central issue present in writing transfer, specifically, the role of first-year writing (FYW) in the development of writers over time. As far back as 2007, scholars (Beaufort; Bergmann and Zepernick; Carroll; Nelms and Dively; Wardle) suggested that writing transfer, or students' ability to adapt and make use of prior writing skills and knowledge, might be problematic and have noted the apparent "lack" of transfer from FYW to other contexts (Bergmann and Zepernick; Wardle). Over the last decade, to understand the mechanisms that drive transfer and seek deeper understanding on the potential "lack" of transfer, scholars have begun exploring the many nuances and issues that influence transfer. These include dispositional factors (Baird and Dilger; Driscoll and Wells), metacognition (Anson; Gorzelsky et al.; Nowacek), transfer among diverse and multilingual writers (James; Zarei and Rahimi), and the role of genre (Blythe and Gonzales; Reiff and Bawarshi). Many questions concerning transfer remain, particularly surrounding long-term study of learners after FYW and how much really transfers to new writing contexts.1 The question of how students develop as learners, engage with their learning, and what happens to students' learning after they leave writing courses is fundamental to our work as writing teachers; this issue is at the heart of our present study.
Our study uses a novel method with which we longitudinally tracked students' writing knowledge, skills, and strategies as they engaged in undergraduate writing experiences over five years. Through this tracking method, we are able to present a very nuanced exploration of learning transfer: if,...