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The Trouble With Transfer, Kathryn Jane Groneman

Theses and Dissertations

It is hoped that the scientific reasoning skills taught in our biology courses will carry over to be applied in novel settings: to new concepts, future courses, other disciplines, and non-academic pursuits. This is the educational concept of transfer. Efforts over many years in the Cell Biology course at BYU to design effective assessment questions that measure competence in both deep understanding of conceptual principles and the ability to draw valid conclusions from experimental data have had at least one disquieting result. The transfer performance of many otherwise capable students is not very satisfactory. In order to explain this unsatisfactory …