Teachers’ beliefs about students’ transfer of learning

The idea that formal learning generalizes, or is transferred, beyond the conditions of initial learning serves as a basis for our educational system. That is, educators hope students will use the learning that develops in the classroom to productively reason about situations they have yet to encounter. Researchers in psychology and mathematics education have been conducting systematic investigations of students’ transfer of learning since the beginning of the twentieth century. However, we still do not know how teachers, the people typically tasked with creating the classroom contexts within which student learning is fostered, think about this phenomenon. This study, thus, addressed the following question: What are teachers’ beliefs about students’ transfer of learning? In the present study, I interviewed 8 practicing teachers twice using instructional tasks related to slope and identified 6 categories of beliefs they exhibited about students’ transfer of learning. These categories extend current conceptualizations of transfer into the domain of mathematics education, represent beliefs that have yet to be articulated by transfer researchers, and provide a foundation on which mathematics teacher educators can begin to think about how to effectively support teachers in developing students who can make productive use of their classroom learning.