Engel, Lam, Meyer, & Nix’s “How Does Expansive Framing Promote Transfer? Several Proposed Explanations and a Research Agenda for Investigating Them”

Engle, R.A., Lam, D.P., Meyer, X.S., & Nix, S.E. (2012). How Does Expansive Framing Promote Transfer? Several Proposed Explanations and a Research Agenda for Investigating Theme. Educational Psychologist, 47(3), 215-231.

In a divergence from much of the work on transfer I’ve read in writing studies, Engel, Lam, Meyer, & Nix (2012) bring physical and social contexts to the fore in their study of transfer. Specifically, their identification of “expansive framing” introduces the importance of setting, time, place, and participants in the transfer of learning. According to Engel, Lam, Meyer, & Nix (2012), “in an expansive framing of roles, learners are positioned as active participants in a learning context where they serve as authors of their own ideas and respondents to the ideas of others” (p. 218). Thus, expansive framing deliberatively moves across contexts and authorship roles in order to promote transfer of learning contexts.

It may be useful to come back if only to reference the one-on-one tutoring experiment cited in on Table 1 (Engel, Lam, Meyer, & Nix, 2012, p.219).