For instructors, getting students to learn, retain and later apply the information they teach is a difficult task, an issue which will be analyzed by two professors Friday at a panel discussion.

“Let’s Talk Teaching—Making it Last: Enduring Concepts and Transferable Skills” is the second installment in a series of discussions intended to facilitate conversation between faculty members in order to exchange effective teaching methods.

The event will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday in the Arcola-Tuscola Room of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

Terri Fredrick, an English professor, and Kai Hung, assistant professor of biological sciences, will lead the brown-bag discussion on the topic of knowledge retention and transfer.

Transfer involves helping students link the information they learn in varying types of classes to better comprehend the new content.

Both professors have a background in studying the effectiveness of such retention.

“One of my jobs in the English program is that I teach in the pedagogy classes,” Fredrick said. “Part of my scholarship focus is on this idea of transfer to help students make community connections.”

Hung said he learned the importance of transfer through his work with the American Society for Microbiology.

“I was telling some colleagues about my experience working to revise the national curriculum for microbiology and part of that revision is to focus on transferable skills and concepts that endure,” Hung said. “That’s how I started learning about these things that we need to pay attention to.”

For example, according to Fredrick, students tend to assume what they learn in composition courses cannot be applied to family and consumer sciences classes, but that is not the case.

“The research out there indicates that transfer is a very hard thing to do, so we have to be deliberate in helping students do it,” Fredrick said.

Because students, for the most part, will not retain all of the information a teacher offers, Fredrick said the instructor should find the most significant points of the course and make sure those are instilled.

“One thing I like to ask other faculty is, ‘What is your 20 percent?’ If students are going to retain only that much from the class, how do we help them retain the most important 20 percent?” Fredrick said.

Hung emphasized the importance of transfer not only between different types of classes, but different levels within the same field of study as well.

“There is discipline-specific transfer such as with introductory biology; you have to retain that material as you climb into the higher classes, but [students] don’t always learn the material as well as they need to,” Hung said.

Hung pointed out that he tries to make sure his students understand the interconnectedness of biology, chemistry and physics.

“I think a lot of our majors tend to focus too much on biology and not see connections like the other sciences,” Hung said. “When I teach biology, whenever I apply a chemistry principle, I say ‘This is like what you learned in chemistry. What you learnt today, you will definitely need to know in the next class that you take like this.’”

Both Fredrick and Hung indicated that ‘Let’s Talk Teaching’ will only be the beginning of what will hopefully become a common goal of successful transfer.

“It’s a pretty big topic,” Hung said. “Obviously we’re not going to solve the problem in an hour and a half, but it’s a good place to start.”

Kimberly Foster can be reached at 581-2812 or denphotodesk@gmail.com.