Socializing the knowledge transfer probl

Socializing the knowledge transfer problem Roy Pea, 1987

Scribner and Cole 1981 use a literacy definition much like disessas

Possibly literacy is a way of recovering the value of programming: even if it is not intrinsically good for you, it affords sociocultural learning opportunities through literacy practices.

Question: Thorndike challenged the general utility of learning Latin; Pea did the same with programming. Has this lack of transfer from devontextualized skills also been shown for rote math practice?

What shall we make of schools detachment from the here and now? If ethnographic observations show high class students being socialized into higher status roles engaging with more abstract issues, and lower class students are not, then it could be that the one experiences authentic learning opportunities, while the other is given irrelevant material to learn, and then is blamed for not being interested.

Social interactions in which thinking processes are made explicit, or modeled,seem to provide important fostering conditions for learning to think well and transfer what one knows to new problem contexts within a broad domain such as reading, writing, or mathematics (Collins & Brown, in press-b; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Scardam

Bereiter& Steinbach,1984;Schoenfeld,1985).Theyappeartoenhancethe"disposition" to think (Resnick, 1985). It is unclear what the locus of such effects are, but in part they I may provide a culture for thinking in which such activities come to be seen as valued con- tributions (Schoenfeld, in press). Observation of modeling alone is insufficient. Students need to try out thinking themselves, and subject their own thinking processes to commun- ity reaction and supportive critique. In participating in this social “zone of proximal de- velopment” (Vygotsky, 1978), a child may better envision the new capabilities he or she would have if only the knowledge the other person had contributed were acquired. These think-aloud activities may also positively alter a child’s selfconcept, their beliefs in whethertheirintelligencecanbedevelopedoris"given", andtheirfeelingsaboutanxiety, failure, and other potentially disablingemotional blocks to either the knowledge aquisi- tion or application sides of transfer of learning.

Here connecting making thinking visible to creating thinking cultures (cognitive apprenticeship)!

A good discussion of scaffolding that could be helpful in framing the programming languages paper