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Understanding What Influences Transfer Between Scientific Disciplines, Shaye Fowler

Scholars Week

Transfer, the ability to apply a learned concept to a new context, is an assumed outcome of most undergraduate curricula. This is particularly true in the case of energy as a concept applied across science disciplines. Chemistry courses, for example, expect students to understand and apply energy-related arguments when learning about atomic structure and bonding, presumably relying on energy-related ideas learned first in physics. However, students are often introduced to energy ideas with discipline-specific vocabulary and problem-solving tasks, obscuring the fact that energy ideas translate across the disciplines. Consequently, students may develop compartmentalized, surface-level understandings. We are investigating student transfer …