General and Specific Influences on the Extension of Learning: Some Suggestions from Recent Cognitive Psychology

Extract

Consider the following pattern of events in special education teaching. You have identified a four-step procedure that is important for the current topic you are working on with your students. The topic might be in a curriculum area like mathematics or in a behavioural area such as social skills. You devise and carry out a series of lessons on this topic and, after a suitable period of practice, you are pleased to observe that the steps in the procedure are used successfully by most of the group. The procedure is also used on the day following the original teaching, when you reinstate the training situation and conditions: Many of the students produce the procedure without prompting! The next day you test to see whether the students will use the procedure in a situation which involves a modification to the conditions you used in the original training. You might change the format of the mathematics problem or the social situation. For many of the students it seems as though your teaching in the use of the procedure never occurred. They act as though the procedure no longer exists. They do remember it when you remind them of the original training situation, but they don’t do that unless you provide the reminder. They have learned the procedure but they can’t transfer that learning.