Heeding previous scholars' calls for a critical investigation of the role of reflection in the professional development of tutors, this article examines reflections written by tutors in the context of conference records. More specifically, the authors investigate the consequences of incorporating a prompt to reflect on tutoring strategies into our online conference-records database. The authors first present the results of their opening coding of nearly 300 conference records, offering a taxonomy of specific types of reflections found in the conference records. The authors then identify three shifts in the content of conference records written after the introduction of the reflection prompt. Finally, the authors draw on analysis of tutor interviews to illuminate how the positive influence of the reflection prompt is inextricably linked to a larger culture of reflection that is often collaborative and leads to transfer of learning within and beyond the writing center.

Positioned within our field’s work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that helped me identify a key problem in my inquiry-based first-year composition classroom: while students were comfortable asking questions, they were not asking the kinds of questions that would help them move across assigned genres most successfully. I explain how this finding led me to develop a rhetorical reflection assignment and explore the rhetorical reflections of two students in my fall 2016 FYC course to identify and describe what happens when these knowledge domains are explicitly emphasized in reflective tasks and to consider questions for future study of this kind of reflective writing.

In this article, we investigate a new construct for conceptualizing learning transfer with writing knowledge: Transformative Experience (TE). With origins in educational psychology, TE has been effective for promoting transfer with scientific concepts in previous research, but not yet considered in relation to writing or other presumably procedural subjects. To investigate the usefulness of TE for revealing new dimensions of writer development, we present a brief case study focused on faculty members writing for scholarly publication. We use qualitative responses to a survey about faculty members’ experiences in a formal writing group to illustrate the three dimensions of TE in the context of writer development: active use, expansion of perception, and experiential value. Although we study advanced faculty writers, findings have implications for teaching and learning writing more broadly. Specifically, we argue that using TE as a framework for interpreting what learners do with writing knowledge widens the “warming trend” in transfer research, nuancing our understanding of writing transfer by attending to perceptual and experiential aspects of learning. We propose instructional interventions to test how incorporating TE into writing pedagogy might enhance teaching and learning for transfer.

This article tracks the emergence of the concept of “transfer talk”—a concept distinct from transfer of learning—and teases out the implications of transfer talk for theories of transfer of learning. The concept of transfer talk was developed through a systematic examination of 30 writing center transcripts and is defined as “the talk through which individuals make visible their prior learning (in this case, about writing) or try to access the prior learning of someone else.” In addition to including a taxonomy of transfer talk and analysis of which types occur most often in this set of conferences, this article advances two propositions about the nature of transfer of learning: (1) transfer of learning may have an important social, even collaborative, component and (2) although meta-awareness about writing has long been recognized as valuable for transfer of learning, more automatized knowledge may play an important role as well.

One of the goals for tutors of academic writing is to help student writers tailor their writing processes to different writing projects so that students adapt what they know about one type of writing to another. This ability to write in different contexts can be explained by the theory of transfer of learning, which is generally defined as the ability to take something learned in one context and adapt, apply, or remix knowledge or skills in new contexts, including educational, civic, personal, or professional (Driscoll 2011). The mind, seeing similarities to what is already known, extends what is similar to another activity (Haskell 2001: 11). Tutors of writing need to know about transfer. Six categories of transfer – content, context, genres, writers’ prior knowledge, students’ ability to reflect, and dispositions – offer a lens to help researchers, trainers of tutors, or tutors (whether of L1 or L2 writers) to better identify where and how transfer could happen so that tutors are more prepared to look for opportunities to tutor for transfer. This paper offers insights into how these categories help tutors of academic writing who want to enhance students’ acquisition of academic skills.

Introduction: Faculty members have little time and usually lack expertise to provide writing feedback on lab reports. Sending students to a writing center, an existing resource on virtually all college campuses, could fill that gap. However, the majority of peer writing tutors are in nontechnical majors, and little research exists on training them to provide support for engineering students. Research question: Can peer writing tutors without technical backgrounds be trained to provide effective feedback to engineering students? About the case: Previously, sending students to the writing center was ineffective. The students did not see the value, and the tutors did not feel capable of providing feedback to them. To remedy this situation, an interdisciplinary training method was developed collaboratively by an engineering professor and the writing center director. Situating the case: Researchers have suggested that effective writing center help for engineering students is possible, and the authors have designed an interdisciplinary training method that has produced positive results. Supporting literature includes the use of generalist tutors, writing in the disciplines, genre theory, and knowledge transfer. Methods/approach: This was a three-year experiential project conducted in a junior-level engineering course. The assignment, a lab report, remained the same. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from students and tutors. Results/discussion: Tutor feedback and student satisfaction significantly improved. However, a few students who were satisfied overall still expressed interest in having their reports reviewed by a tutor with a technical background. Conclusions: Interdisciplinary tutor training can improve the feedback of peer writing tutors, providing support for faculty efforts to improve student writing. The method requires minimal faculty time and capitalizes on existing resources.

Writing transfer research often illuminates the writing abilities, attitudes, and assumptions college writers bring to a writing assignment, but faculty members across the disciplines may not have the tools for understanding what the students in their particular classes bring to their particular writing assignments. In this proposed model, students respond to a series of reflective prompts before, during, and after completion of a major upper-division writing assignment. Faculty members then reflect on how these responses might change the way they assign writing and teach course content. The disciplinary and course-based threshold concepts emerging from this process suggest a dynamic and situated approach that both facilitates faculty understanding of transfer and offers a method for responding to it.

This article offers the term “accommodation transfer” as a way to understand the rhetorical skills disabled students transfer alongside writing knowledge as they access college writing assignments and writing classrooms. This study is based on five qualitative interviews with disabled college students and draws upon both writing transfer research and disability studies. The author explores how participants adapted writing process knowledge and learned how to negotiate their accommodation needs with instructors across their academic careers. Specifically, these negotiations include assessing instructors’ stances towards disability and testing effective genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability with instructors. The article concludes with two suggestions for cripping teaching for transfer: embracing and teaching crip time for writing, and highlighting the relationship between mentorship and interdependence.

Inspired by studies on transfer of learning that have provided helpful insight into metacognition and reflection, this instructional note describes an activity that asks students to reflect on skills learned and simultaneously think forward to future writing situations.

Researching writing-related dispositions is of critical concern for understanding writing transfer and writing development. However, as a field we need better tools and methods for identifying, tracking, and analyzing dispositions. This article describes a failed attempt to code for five key dispositions (attribution, self-efficacy, persistence, value, and self-regulation) in a longitudinal, mixed methods, multi-institutional study that otherwise successfully coded for other writing transfer factors. We present a “study of a study” that examines our coders’ attempts to identify and code dispositions and describes broader understandings from those findings. Our findings suggest that each disposition presents a distinct challenge for coding and that dispositions, as a group, involve not only conceptual complexity but also cultural, psychological, and temporal complexity. For example, academic literacy learning and dispositions intersect with systems of socio-economic, political, and cultural inequity and exploitation; this entwining presents substantial problems for coders. Methodological considerations for understanding the complexity of codes, effectively and accurately coding for dispositions, considering the four complexities, and understanding the interplay between the individual and the social are explored. We describe how concepts from literacy studies scholarship may help shape writing transfer scholarship concerning dispositions and transfer research more broadly.

Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write, there is limited understanding of how students use conversational moves to collaboratively build knowledge about writing across contexts. This article reports on a study of focus group conversations involving first-year students in a cohort program. Our analysis identified two patterns of group conversation among students: “co-telling” and “co-constructing,” with the latter leading to more complex writing knowledge. We also used Beaufort’s domains of writing knowledge to examine how co-constructing conversations supported students in abstracting knowledge beyond a single classroom context and in negotiating local constraints. Our findings suggest that co-constructing is a valuable process that invites students to do the necessary work of remaking their knowledge for local use. Ultimately, our analysis of the role of student conversation in the construction of writing knowledge contributes to our understanding of the myriad activities that surround transfer of learning.

The authors report on a study of writing transfer using a relatively novel method. Specifically, they use screencast videos to study the work of a dozen undergraduates who had taken first-year writing and were now enrolled in an interdisciplinary biology class. The authors argue that students were able to adapt to the writing requirements in the biology class because they implicitly understood themselves to be engaged in Carter’s metagenre of “research from sources.” Because students in this study had been asked to engage in that metagenre at least since high school, they believed their writing habits were established well before first-year writing, and consequently they have trouble recognizing the influence of such a course on their subsequent work. The study also revealed that students coordinated multiple texts simultaneously in order to engage in processes akin to what Howard has called “patchwriting” but also similar to the habits of professional writers. Whereas professional writers have well established networks for seeking information, the students in this study worked in relative isolation, using a few sources found haphazardly through library or Google searches. The authors suggest that instructors spend more time helping students develop effective networks of information, including experts and organizations in addition to published sources.

In this case study, an accomplished academic writer struggles to produce very brief game summaries for a local newspaper as part of the service requirements to his son’s community football team. An analysis of his experience demonstrates the universal challenge of transfer regardless of prior knowledge or meta-awareness of rhetorical strategies for writing in new or unfamiliar settings and argues for a more nuanced understanding of existing ability, disposition, context, and genre in the deployment of knowledge for writing.

This article details findings from a research study on learning transfer, in which most students reported transferring reading processes and explicitly linked their successes in writing to their successes in reading. Reading offered a pathway through their university learning experiences, improving self-efficacy and engagement.

A pilot program of a co-requisite Learning Support writing course (ENGL 0999)  adapts features of Studio and Accelerated Learning programs to a two-semester sequence of First Year Writing. The program was designed to cultivate critical reflection, writing knowledge transfer, and student-led discussion. Narratives from the program director (Mendenhall) and a lead instructor (Brockland-Nease) discuss challenges in developing the pedagogical and programmatic support necessary to engage students and communicate with other writing instructors in the co-requisite format. The authors argue that ongoing, collaborative program design plays a critical role in supporting pedagogy for courses that, by design, serve as adjuncts to core writing classes

In the wake of research showing failures in transfer of writing skills, the question of how to help students see how their learning goes beyond individual learning experiences has become a pressing concern in composition.In addressing this concern, scholars have primarily focused on improving our classroom pedagogy so that we are teaching for transfer.However, with the finding that transfer often needs to be cued and guided in order to be successful, we need to begin focusing on writing centers as crucial spaces for the facilitation of students' understanding of the transportability of writing-related knowledge.This article presents findings from a study that examines the effects of teaching writing center tutors about transfer theory.Findings suggest that educating writing center tutors about transfer theory can positively affect their ability to facilitate the transfer of writing-related knowledge.

Drawing from a five-year longitudinal data set following thirteen college writers through undergraduate writing and beyond, we explore the impact of students’ emotions and emotional dispositions on their ability to transfer writing knowledge and on their overall writing development. Participants experienced a range of emotions concerning their writing, but those emotions could be broadly categorized as generative, disruptive, or circumstantial. Students managed these emotions in different ways, with some approaching their learning less emotionally (rational interpreters), others moreso (emotional interpreters), and a final group using metacognitive practices to manage their emotions (emotional managers). Our results suggest that metacognitive concepts of monitoring and control are keys to students’ navigation of the complex emotional landscape of writing in higher education. Our discussion posits ways that faculty can help students become emotional managers and work with students’ emotions in the classroom, and it suggests further avenues for research.

The Writing Centre in Maynooth University, Ireland, is proud of its learner-centred approach (Biggs 1999, Lea et al. 2003). In the Centre we begin where students are, by asking them about their writing concerns. We also appreciate the need to recognise and build on their approaches to writing, their effective writing processes and their writing achievements. We see this under the broader heading of ‘writing transfer’. In this article, we outline our strategies to promote transfer and thinking about transfer with students before and after one-to-one appointments. In a small-scale research project we conducted, our research questions accentuated two potential principles of transfer, as noted in the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer, that ‘[s]uccessful writing transfer occurs when a writer can transform rhetorical knowledge and rhetorical awareness into performance … [when they] draw on previous knowledge and strategies … [and] … transform or repurpose that prior knowledge, if only slightly’, and that University programs can ‘teach for transfer’ (Perkins and Salomon 1988) through the use of enabling practices (Elon 2013: 4). Our work suggests that highlighting transfer in the writing centre context reinforces our learner-centred approach while also acknowledging the literacy archives with which our students present.

While formidable at both two- and four-year colleges, the obstacles to knowledge transfer from ENG 101 to other courses are especially challenging at community colleges—a point overlooked by transfer scholars in composition, whose gaze so often seems to be on universities and liberal arts colleges.

Dianne Fallon responds to Blaauw-Hara’s article in this issue.

This essay provides a brief overview of transfer theory and threshold concepts and discusses how they can be applied to general-education writing courses.

A study of twenty-five newly returned adult students finds that students with more process experience used more and more specific process analogies to construct their writing processes for school assignments than those with less process experience. Cues from peers and sense of academic identity also influenced transfer of process knowledge.

This article reviews the deeply conflicted literature on learning transfer, especially as it applies to rhetorical knowledge and skill. It then describes a study in which six students are followed through their first co-op work term to learn about which resources they draw on as they enter a new environment of professional writing. It suggests that although students engage in little one-to-one transfer of learning, they draw on a wide range of internalized rhetorical strategies learned from across their academic experience.

Higher education has become increasingly concerned in recent years with its role in sustainability studies, both in the sustainability of the physical environments of its institutions and in the education of students as citizens and experts in a world facing complex environmental, economic, and social challenges. This review essay discusses the importance of sustainability-minded pedagogies in the writing classroom through an examination of Fountainhead Press’s new V (Voices) composition reader series . The essay discusses ways to integrate the V series themed readers and their assignments into a sustainability-minded writing classroom, and it concludes by suggesting important links between sustainability pedagogy and writing transfer.

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper’s failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation—as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the utterance—often disadvantages students in their future writing endeavors. I conclude by suggesting one way to encourage students to situate their research writing as a part of—rather than separate from—an activity system. By making the research paper an integral part of a entire course sequence, students will be better equipped to understand the role that research and writing plays within a specific activity system.

This program profile describes a new approach towards integrating communication within Mechanical Engineering curricula. The author, who holds a joint appointment between Technical Communication and Mechanical Engineering at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, has been collaborating with Mechanical Engineering colleagues to establish a department-wide program with the goal of facilitating transfer of rhetorical instruction to engineering deliverables involving written and oral communication. To carry out this goal, the program incorporates a set of best practices informed by prior research in the areas of knowledge transfer, writing studies, and educational theory. These best practices and the theories informing them are described in this profile. In addition, the author offers preliminary lessons learned and presents implications for writing faculty interested in facilitating transfer through interdisciplinary initiatives.

In this essay, I examine the problems I now see with the sample curriculum I proposed in College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction in 2007. There are numerous factors that must be considered in designing a writing course: choice of subject matter, choice of genres to assign, sequencing of writing assignments, number of assignments, and using both content and pedagogy to enhance the possibility for positive transfer of learning for student writers. The problems in these areas of curriculum design, both in my work and in writing studies at large, as well as recommendations to eliminate those problems are explored here.

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.

Within composition studies, transfer and rhetorical genre studies have found an especially productive partnership for exploring together whether and in what ways students transfer writing-related knowledge from one context to another. This article continues this synthesis by turning to Anne Freadman’s notion of uptake to suggest a more robust understanding of transfer for writing . As I will show, uptake foregrounds the role that heterogeneity, selection, and problem-solving play in how literate learners encounter and make sense of new writing tasks at the convergence of prior genre knowledge and current, local genred events. This micro discursive space of uptake is an important site for thinking about transfer in that it is partially through this process that prior genres meet, are transformed, rejected, or imported whole cloth into new rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this article argues that, through uptake, high road transfer is reconceived as a dynamic, problem-solving endeavor where writers can be encouraged to proactively sort through and make selections in and amongst prior genre knowledge.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship between writing studies and the concept of learning transfer. First it reviews three stages in the changing attitudes toward learning transfer in writing theory that is influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory, and situated learning. Then it reviews learning transfer theory itself, an area that is seldom explicitly referred to in writing studies. The article concludes with a synthesis that brings transfer theory to bear on writing studies, suggesting directions for developing research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This paper evaluates the role of reprocessability and symbol sets, two of the media capabilities identified in Media Synchronicity Theory, and different recipient characteristics on knowledge transfer. An experimental study manipulating the two specific channel interface characteristics was conducted to test the proposed model. Results indicate that symbol sets have a positive effect on knowledge possessed and knowledge applied. Motivation to learn significantly affected knowledge possessed and knowledge applied, while absorptive capacity was found to only influence knowledge possessed. The hypothesized relationships between reprocessability and knowledge internalization were marginally supported, and future research is suggested to address this issue. </para>

This study examines the content of press releases from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Centers (STCs) to determine how public information officers (PIOs) presented the outcomes of centers to journalists and the public. A total of 68 press releases were analyzed for type of news covered, visibility of centers and their funding agency, extent of inter-institutional cooperation in the issuance of releases, and players covered. Three-quarters of STC releases mentioned the center, but less than half mentioned the NSF STC program and one-quarter didn't mention the center name at all. PIOs covering the STCs mainly issued research-oriented press releases accredited to their own institution. There was a low level of inter-institutional cooperation, with 13% of press releases jointly issued. Compared to research results and institutional news, which together accounted for 82% of the news events, broader activities such as knowledge transfer, diversity enhancement, and education were much less visible.

An assessment project aimed at examining transfer of learning from English 101 to a subsequent psychology course provided insight on transfer and on student metacognition and also created a rich opportunity to exchange scholarship and ideas between disciplines.

Virtual teams enable knowledge workers from around the globe to participate in a variety of projects through computer-mediated interactions. Given that many of these virtual teams, including those involved in open source software development and other systems development, may not have preassigned leaders, it is important to understand the factors that explain why an individual may be considered a leader by team members in other locations. Specifically, the factors information systems development (ISD) ability, contribution, knowledge transfer, and team cohesion are hypothesized to influence remote leader emergence in distributed ISD teams. The proposed model is tested in a study using ISD teams composed of student members from both the US and Scandinavia. ISD ability, contribution, and knowledge transfer in cohesive teams were found to be significant predictors of remote leadership emergence. The study also suggests that US and Scandinavian members do not use the same criteria for identifying remote team members as leaders and offers a theoretical explanation of the results.

This study investigates the influence of students' perceptions of task similarity/ difference on the transfer of writing skills. A total of 42 students from a freshman ESL writing course completed an out-of-class writing task. For half of the students, the subject matter of the writing task was designed to be similar to the writing course; for the other half, it was designed to be different. All students were also interviewed about the writing task. Reports of learning transfer were identified in the interview transcripts, and students' performances on the task and on a recent assignment from the course were assessed. Results indicate that the intended task similarity/difference (i.e., in subject matter) did not have the expected impact on learning transfer; however, students' perceptions of task similarity/difference did influence learning transfer. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and future research are discussed.

Knowledge transfer among geographically separated members is recognized as a critical ingredient for collaborative accomplishment of work in virtual teams. However, due to the "localness" of knowledge, such transfer of knowledge is believed to be inherently problematic; thus, it is important to develop a solid understanding of the factors that enable knowledge transfer in such contexts. Drawing on existing literature on knowledge management and virtual teamwork, we identify four Cs (communication, capability, credibility, and culture) associated with individuals who transfer significant amounts of knowledge to remote members. Next, we test the four Cs in the context of US-Norwegian virtual teams engaged in systems development. The volume of communication, the credibility of the communicator, and the nature of cultural values held (i.e., collectivism) by the communicator were found to significantly predict the extent of knowledge transferred; although, contrary to expectations, capability was not found to have a significant influence. A number of implications for virtual team participants and professional communicators are articulated. Avenues for future research are also suggested.

This article presents findings from an empirical study investigating the transfer of rhetorical knowledge, defined as audience awareness, sense of purpose, organization, use of visuals, professional appearance, and style, between the technical communication and the engineering disciplines. Various data collection methods were used to examine the skills and rhetorical knowledge students learned in a technical communication course and determine whether or not students relied on that knowledge as they completed writing assignments in an engineering course. Also examined was the effect of workplace experiences on shaping students' rhetorical knowledge. This study indicated that students did appear to transfer rhetorical strategies between different contexts, and those strategies were learned in the workplace as well as the classroom.

Many of today's telecommuters are knowledge workers who require substantial communications to perform their jobs. The research presented investigates the nature of communication links between individuals in two work groups comprised of both telecommuters and nontelecommuters. Communication network analysis is used to map the communications in the groups and identify blocks of individuals. Blocks are groups of individuals with high levels of communication linkages among them. Work setting, gender, job type, tenure, and number of telecommuting days are investigated as potential factors in determining individuals' membership in blocks. There appears to be a tendency for telecommuters to communicate more with other telecommuters as well as for females to communicate more with one another. However, only job type was statistically related to block membership. These results indicate that there is a limited impact of telecommuting on the communication structure of work groups, which should reduce potential concerns of telecommuters about being left out of the office network. They should also reduce managers' concerns about having knowledge transfer and assimilation of corporate culture differences between telecommuting and nontelecommuting employees.

This qualitative study examined the transitions that writers make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Subjects were six university seniors enrolled in a special “writing internship course” in which they discussed and analyzed the writing they were doing in 12-week professional internships at corporations, small businesses, and public service agencies in a major metropolitan area. Participant-observer and case-study data included drafts and final copies of all writing that the interns produced on the job (including texts and suggested revisions by other employees), an ethnographic log of data and speculations arising from the group discussions, written course journals from each intern, transcriptions of taped, discourse-based and general interviews with the interns, and a final 15-page retrospective analysis of each intern's writing on the job. Results showed a remarkably consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as the interns adjusted to their new writing communities. The results have important implications for the lateral and vertical transfer of writing skills across different communicative contexts.

R. M. Gagné's distinction between lateral and vertical transfer can be elaborated for written composition: (a) the lateral transfer of mechanical and formal skills and (b) the vertical transfer of higher-order knowledge in the domain of rhetoric and writing. Vertical transfer of writing skills is situational: a function of the context and content of a specific rhetorical situation. Success in a situational writing task depends on two types of domain-specific knowledge being operational: (a) knowledge of the specific content of the subject matter and (b) knowledge of the domain of rhetoric and writing. The theory of lateral and vertical transfer as applied to writing is compatible with current conceptions of declarative and procedural cognitive processes and with a balanced pedagogy of both student-centered and direct, content-oriented instruction. Two appendixes present practical procedures based on transfer theory for improving general program goals and classroom instruction of writing.

Encyclopedic storage is a method of storing knowledge that avoids unnecessary duplication and provides convenient access to the stored materials. This paper discusses a particular approach to encyclopedic storage of scientific and technical information which can now be implemented. Motivation for this approach is developed here by considering first some of the basic properties of the process of knowledge transfer via the written record, leading to the development of a unit of knowledge. In terms of this unit, the `size' of scientific and technical knowledge, and of electrical engineering knowledge is estimated. This unit also becomes the basic building block for the proposed encyclopedic system. A very small experimental version of such a system is now in existence.