Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions.

Previous transfer researchers within writing studies have made tremendous gains in understanding how social contexts and curricula influence writing behaviors. In this article, we argue that individual dispositions, such as motivation, value, and self-efficacy, need to occupy a more central focus in writing transfer research. After describing shifts from focusing on the educational context to the individual in composition research broadly, we examine previous writing transfer research, tracing a growing need in better understanding student dispositions. In the second half of the article, we identify five qualities of student dispositions and describe four specific dispositions—value, self-efficacy, attribution, and self-regulation—that influence writing transfer. The article concludes by emphasizing the role of the individual and by articulating new avenues of research for better understanding student dispositions in writing transfer. A growing body of research in writing studies has focused on understanding students’ struggles to transfer writing knowledge from high school to college, from course to course, and from university to workplace settings. Composition as a field has made tremendous gains in addressing the problem of transfer through activity-based curricular models and in examining students’ knowledge. However, less attention has been paid to individual, internal qualities that may impact transfer; these qualities, which we call dispositions, include what the Framework for Success for Post-Secondary Writing Instruction calls “habits of mind,” such as persistence, self-efficacy and metacognition. As noted educational psychologist David Perkins and others have described, dispositions are not knowledge, skills, or abilities—they are qualities that determine how learners use and adapt their knowledge. Independently, both authors of this article began dissertations on transfer of learning using exploratory, grounded, and mixed methods approaches to our data collection and analysis. We intended to build upon the rich transfer work of David Russell, David Smit, Anne Beaufort, and Elizabeth Wardle, and to examine curricular interventions for transfer, although our data lead us in a much different direction. Despite the differences in our geographic locations, the educational levels of our participants, and our research questions, we discovered surprisingly similar findings concerning the importance of individual learner dispositions. Our findings suggested that student dispositions were critical to success in transfer of learning--an emphasis that we had not seen widely addressed in the literature. While we agree that the emphasis on contexts and curriculum are essential for understanding writing transfer, we suggest that dispositions play an equally essential role. In this article, we argue that writing researchers, writing faculty, and writing program administrators (WPAs) should more explicitly consider the role of learners’ dispositions because this may allow us to more fully understand and address writing transfer. After briefly describing the ways that individuals and contexts interact in the broader composition literature, we discuss previous literature that examines writing transfer. Through this work, we trace a growing emphasis—and need—to better understand student dispositions. In the second half of the article, we articulate a theory of student Page 1 of 15 CF 26: “Beyond Knowledge and Skills” by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/beyond-knowledge-skills.php dispositions that identifies five key qualities of dispositions. Using data from our two studies and work from education and psychology, we then describe four specific dispositions—value, selfefficacy, attribution, and self-regulation—that influence writing transfer. We conclude by suggesting future avenues of research concerning dispositions and writing transfer. Composition’s Turns Toward Integrating the Educational Context and the Individual Over the past decade, the gaze of writing transfer researchers has understandably drifted towards pedagogical interventions and classroom contexts; however, we argue that researchers need to embrace a more nuanced perspective in which both the role of the instructional context and the role of the individual and his/her dispositions receive equal consideration. We situate this move toward a more integrated approach within a long history of similar moves made inside composition studies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Scott Consigny sought to rectify the divide between Lloyd Bitzer’s privileging of context and Richard Vatz’s privileging of the individual by arguing that both the individual and the context were, and still are, essential to understanding the rhetorical situation. Likewise, over the past twenty years, composition researchers have shifted from understanding literacy development as something that takes place primarily within the educational context of the classroom, to something impacted by the individual’s experiences outside the classroom. In the early 1990s, Marilyn Sternglass made a clear case for a “whole person” approach to studying literate development that includes understanding individual student histories and how non-academic settings impact academic life (236). Taking up this call in his 2008 article, Kevin Roozen presents an ethnographic study of one basic writer and demonstrates how this writer’s literate activity and identity in non-school areas (comedy, poetry, etc.) profoundly shape the writer’s educational activities. Composition’s understanding of genre, as Bawarshi and Reiff discuss in Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research and Pedagogy, has evolved from a view of genres as simple textual categories to one that see genres as complex social actions that include cultural knowledge (4), intention (4), and motivation (75). In this way, genre theory brings together textual features of production, contexts of production, tools for production, and—implicitly—individual dispositions that mitigate that production. We note these examples to show that, as composition has sought to understand fundamentals like rhetorical situations, literacy development, and genre theory, it has done so by, first, gravitating toward context. Only later does it self-correct to include the impact of the individual learner. In the same way, within composition’s research on transfer we neither advocate abandonment of context nor a 180-degree turn toward individual dispositions. Rather, we acknowledge both are essential to understanding transfer. Transfer of Learning: Seminal Studies The history of the development of knowledge transfer theory is analogous to the historical shifts in composition theory described above. On the one hand, most definitions of knowledge transfer involve three elements: something learned in the past, something applied in the future, and something that enables what was learned in the past to directly affect or influence what is done in the future (Haskell; Perkins and Salomon; Royer, Mestre and Dufresne). On the other hand, writing transfer theorists have not always considered the learner or what the learner brings with him/her to the transfer problem. In some definitions, the learner is someone to whom or through whom transfer happens rather than being the agent of transfer. Page 2 of 15 CF 26: “Beyond Knowledge and Skills” by Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/beyond-knowledge-skills.php Compositionists who have studied knowledge transfer have reflected this theoretical bent by drawing upon activity theory, and while it accounts for some individual aspects, it largely privileges actions and contexts. Russell’s “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction” is frequently cited to describe the limitations of first-year composition (FYC) in facilitating knowledge transfer. Using a “general ball” metaphor, Russell explains why “General Writing Skills Instruction” (GSWI) courses fail to teach students to generalize. He equates a GWSI course to a course in general ball handling, where students learn how to hold the ball, bounce the ball, throw the ball, etc., but do not learn those skills inside of contexts where they would actually use them (baseball, football, basketball etc.). Russell argues that students can’t transfer “general ball” to the disciplines and suggests that we encourage more writing in the disciplines (WID) and writing across the curriculum (WAC), and use an activity theory approach. Russell’s work is based on the research of Terttu Tuomi-Grohn and Yrjo Engestrom, who describe activity theory as that which emphasizes organizations and movement through activity systems: The conceptualization of transfer based on socio-cultural views take into account the changing social situations and individual’s multidirectional movement from one organization to another, from home to school or from workplace to school and back. Based on activity theory, this conceptualization expands the basis of transfer from the actions of individuals to collective organizations. It’s not a matter of individual moves between school and workplace but of the efforts of school and workplace to create together new practices. (34) As they argue, activity systems are structured to include a number of features: rules, division of labor, community, subjects, objects, instruments, and outcomes. It is through the relationship of each aspect of this larger activity system that successful boundary crossing (transfer) can occur. Tuomi-Grohn and Engestrom articulate that transfer in this model is primarily driven by the interaction and resolution of conflict between different activity systems, such as school and work. While activity theory makes space for the individual, its emphasis is on the system of activity and the organization. Writing researchers have built upon Russell’s activity theory approa