Learning In and Out of School (continued)

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This line of research has important implications for teaching that is intended to promote transfer. The major finding is that students often fail to transfer what they learned in school to problems outside of the school setting and often fail to transfer what they learned outside of school to solving problems in school. Thus, these findings indicate a need to teach in ways that promote transfer—that is, ways that help students be able to use what they learned in school when they are confronted with problems outside of school.

This example helps distinguish two views of the generality of learning. According to the classic view of learning, students abstract a general procedure from instruction and apply it across a wide variety of problems. Such a view would predict that people would use a school-taught procedure to solve the coconut problem. In contrast, the situated view of learning is that students acquire a specific procedure based on the context in which it was encountered and are able to use it mainly within that context. The coconut example supports a theory of situated learning—the idea that learning is shaped by and depends on the situation in which it takes place, including the social and cultural context of learning. An important challenge for educators is to create the kinds of social contexts that foster meaningful learning—that is, being able to use what is learned to solve new problems in new situations.