The information students should retain for later use is not the specific content that is taught, but the overall concept that makes up the bigger picture, said two professors on Friday.

The practice of knowledge transfer was the focus of “Let’s Talk Teaching—Making it Last: Enduring Concepts and Transferable Skills” in the Arcola-Tuscola Room of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union.

Kai Hung, a biological sciences professor, and Terri Fredrick, an English professor, led a group of more than 15 teachers in the seminar, primarily by splitting into small groups in order to get conversation flowing.

“Students are not making connections between different classes or between longitudinal, progressional classes,” Hung said. “(They) are not seeing the ways that new skills that they learn can be applied to other areas.”

Fredrick said the issue of transferring information is not a new one as research on the topic dates back to more than 100 years ago.

“Research says our generation didn’t do it, our parents’ generation didn’t do it,” Fredrick said.

Hung and Fredrick addressed the four types of transfer that students can utilize: near, far, reflexive and mindful.

“Near transfer” involves applying previous knowledge to something in a closely related field, while “far transfer” indicates utilizing information between two completely different contexts.

“Reflexive transfer” requires teachers to trigger the students’ memory of content by attempting to mirror the way the students first learned the information.

The process of “mindful transfer,” meanwhile, is “deliberate, effortful abstraction” of knowledge in order to search for connections, Hung said.

He said one problem people run into when learning is “negative transfer,” which occurs when the wrong knowledge is activated and applied to the new content, impeding the learner’s ability to understand the new information.

To demonstrate “negative transfer,” Hung showed a video of an elderly man attempting to learn the new Windows 8 computer interface. The man’s expectations for the classic Start button and other previous features confused him to the point where he asked, “Are they trying to drive me to Mac?”

Hung and Fredrick had the participants break into small groups to take part in an activity to share their experiences with transfer.

The activity involved the teachers sharing instances of students failing to apply old concepts to new ones.

Ann Brownson, a professor and education librarian at Booth Library, gave the example of students learning how to search on one database and later being unable to transfer the basics in order to utilize another one.

“They should be able to figure out, given what they know, that there must be some kind of overlap there that can help,” Brownson said.

After the teachers compared their experiences, Fredrick and Hung offered “best practices” that the instructors can utilize in order to instill and later activate information.

One solution Fredrick and Hung gave was “metacognition,” which is getting students to look at themselves and how they learn so they can improve.

Fredrick said constant feedback is crucial for metacognition because it helps students identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Hung also presented a process called the 7E model, which offers a checklist for teachers to ensure learning through seven steps to: elicit, engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate and extend.

The first five steps can be repeated as many times as necessary to instill the information, Hung said.

After the seminar, Hung said he considered the event successful, but also just the start.

Kimberly Foster can be reached at 581-2812 or denphotodesk@eiu.edu.