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DoI: 10.7330/9780874219388.c004 4 h o W s t U d e n t s m a K e U s e o f P r i o r K n o W l e d g e i n t h e t r a n s f e r o f K n o W l e d g e a n d P r ac t i c e i n W r i t i n g In high school, I received a six out of six on the writing portion of my FCAT. . . . I figured I knew all there was to know [about writing]; I was surely mistaken. – Kevin As the previous chapter suggests, one significant factor influencing students is their prior experience. Marta and Emma, for instance, who brought to college very positive writing experiences from high school, continue to draw on that prior knowledge almost mechanically, while Rick and Clay develop new knowledge as a function of their TFT class. Put more generally, a significant factor in all the case studies that we didn’t appreciate until we began examining the data was the influence of prior knowledge on several dimensions of students’ writing experiences : their attitudes toward writing; the strategies they drew upon; the knowledge about writing contextualizing their practices and, consequently , their development as writers. Prior knowledge, we learned, became one of the more important factors in how writers developed— or didn’t develop. Moreover, students tended to use prior knowledge in different ways, that is, how they would draw upon and employ what they knew in new situations, whether such knowledge and practice was efficacious in the new situation or not. In this chapter, drawing on and reviewing some of the research presented earlier as well as incorporating new research,1 we trace how students make use of prior knowledge and practice in the context of our understanding of transfer: as a dynamic activity through which students, like all composers, actively make use of prior knowledge as they respond to new writing tasks. More specifically, we theorize three dimensions of prior knowledge, and again we have a set of terms that describe key concepts . First, we articulate what we call a point of departure: we theorize that 104 KATHleen BlAKe YAnCeY, lIAne RoBeRTSon, AnD KARA TACzAK students progress, or not, relative to their past performances as writers— not so much relative to their experiences as writers, but rather as they have found themselves represented as writers by others, through external benchmarks like grades and test scores. Second, we learned that students often find themselves entering college courses with an absence of prior knowledge, that is, a dearth of information or experience that would be helpful as they begin writing in college. Our students bring with them, for example, very little knowledge or practice in reading the non-fiction texts that are a staple of college writing contexts. And third, despite these impediments, we found that students actively make use of the prior knowledge and practice they do have, and in three ways: 1) by drawing on both knowledge and practice and adding a limited number of new key concepts to this critical knowledge base, an unsuccessful use of prior knowledge we call assemblage; 2) by reworking and integrating prior knowledge and practice with new knowledge as they address new tasks, a more successful use of prior knowledge we call remix; and 3) by creating new knowledge and practices for themselves when they encounter what we call a setback or critical incident, which is a failed effort to address a new task that prompts critical ways of thinking about what writing is and how to do it. We begin this chapter, then, with a quick review of the ways prior knowledge shapes learning, as explained in How People Learn (Bransford, Pellegrino, and Donovan 2000), before considering what we call the point of departure, defining it and explaining how it influenced writers ’ sense of writerly self and their general conceptions of writing. We then define absent prior knowledge and its effect on transfer, linking it to research on high school language arts curricula, before turning to our typology of uses of prior knowledge—assemblage, remix, and critical incident/setback. HOW PEOPLE LEARN As we saw in earlier chapters, a little-referenced but rich source of research on transfer is the National Research Council volume How People Learn: Mind, Brain, Experience, and School (Bransford, Pellegrino, and Donovan 2000). In addition to...

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