Knowledge Transfer Assessment

There are four ways to test whether students have acquired knowledge transfer skills according to Mayer (2001):

1. Troubleshooting - by asking students why a system does not work.
2. Redesign - by asking students for a redesign of a system for a different purpose.
3. What-if - by asking students what would happen under other conditions.
4. Principle - by asking students the function of a component in the system, or why a component behaves the way it does.

In Computer Science, this is pretty easy to do. Here are some examples:

1. Troubleshooting - have students debug a program, or discover and debug another student's program.
2. Redesign - have students build another version of an application.
3. What-if - have students compare and contrast the use of different algorithms, database design, logic design, infrastructure, etc.
4. Principle - have students construct context diagram, use case diagrams, etc. and explain how one component functions within the entire system.

References:

Mayer, R. (2001). Multimedia Learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.