“Noticing” as an Alternative Transfer of Learning Process

Abstract

As transfer researchers have begun to investigate a broader range of phenomena, they have correspondingly put forward new processes to provide explanatory accounts for the occurrence of transfer. This move coincides with a call to acknowledge the contribution of social interactions, language, cultural artifacts, and normed practices to the generalization of learning. In this article, we posit “noticing” as a plausible transfer process and investigate both individual noticing and the social organization of noticing via the focusing framework. Specifically, we relate the nature of students' reasoning on transfer tasks with what students notice mathematically in classrooms when many sources of information compete for their attention, and then we account for noticing as socially situated in classroom discourse practices, features of mathematical tasks, and the nature of mathematical activity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The development of this article was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant REC-0529502. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Foundation. The data collection and analysis efforts also involved research team member Ricardo Muñoz. We thank Jaime Diamond and Anthony E. Kelly for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.