The most essential characteristic of cognitive psychology is that it recovers mental processes. The step from behavioral psychology to cognitive psychology is consummated with Information Processing.
Within the framework of Educational Psychology, this new approach does not fully satisfy: since it does not get rid of the mechanistic and associationist principles.
Constructuvism departs from these principles. The student becomes the protagonist of learning, actively building the contents, relating the new information with the one in his memory, and the teacher facilitates and promotes learning..
For Kant, knowledge is not completely innate nor is it completely empirical, but is built by man from the data provided by experience, organizing it into schemes through the application of universal rules..
Kant can be considered the antecedent of constructivism and the concept of schema.
Within scientific psychology, the roots are Gestalt Psychology, Piaget and Vygotsky. A characteristic feature of constructivism is that the understanding and construction of knowledge is more important than its mere accumulation.
One of the important roots of Constructivism was Gestalt Psychology. It was developed in Germany at the beginning of the s. XX by Wertheimer, Köhler and Kofka.
The Gestaltists agreed on the study of consciousness, but disagreed on the way of studying it. Structuralists are interested in the analysis of consciousness to discover its elemental elements. Gestaltists think that experiences are studied as a whole, as they are presented in reality, instead of decomposing them, in a sum of elementary parts.
Although they were mainly interested in the subject of perception, they were also concerned with learning and thinking. His main contribution to the explanation of learning is the experience of insight.
According to the Gestaltists, we learn when we understand, when we have an insight into the situation, or what is the same, when all the elements of that situation are presented in their mutual relationships. The concept of insight was developed by Köhler.
An insight is a reorganization of the perceptual field, which implies the perception of stimuli and the perception of their mutual relationships, that is, the appearance of a Gestalt.
According to this point of view, learning consists of learning to perceive stimulating elements and discover their organization and structure. Knowledge is not generated by an addition or association of elements, but by a restructuring of them that gives them a unitary and significant meaning..
Learning occurs when we understand, hence understanding takes precedence over the accumulation of knowledge.
Due to his contradiction of behaviorism at first his works were little known, but when behaviorism fell, Piaget was "discovered". Some of the interesting aspects of Piaget's work are his model of explanation of how human beings get knowledge of the world around them and his model of intellectual development in stages or stages..
For Piaget, the mind is not a blank paper (empiricists), nor is knowledge given to us innate (rationalists). In the same line of what Kant proposed, Piaget thinks that knowledge is constructed by man as a result of the interaction between the person and the environment..
People, from birth, develop our capacities and organize our thought processes in psychological structures to continuously adapt, better and better, to our environment: the goal of cognitive development and learning is adaptation.
But people in their interaction with the environment are subjected to imbalances (or cognitive conflicts) that they tend to compensate with their actions. The human being, then, is an active being that adapts to the environment through balancing processes. Balance is achieved by organisms as a result of two basic adaptation processes: assimilation and accommodation.
The asimilation It consists of the incorporation of external elements within the structures of the organism. At the cognitive level, it consists of incorporating information from the environment into our structures or schemes. A necessary condition for assimilation is the existence of an internal structure in which the new information can be based or related..
Accommodation It is the process of adjustment or modification of the internal structures, of the assimilating structures, to the particular characteristics of the elements that are assimilated. When internal structures are not adequate to incorporate new information, the accommodation process comes into play. In this process, complementary to the previous one, our cognitive schemes or structures adapt to the characteristics of the new knowledge or information from the outside world to make their assimilation possible..
The idea of schema is central to Piaget. Schemas are the basic structures for the construction of knowledge. They are organized systems of thought that allow us to mentally represent the objects and actions of our external world and serve as a reference for the acquisition of knowledge and to guide our behavior.
The schemes are not static, but are in continuous modification as a consequence of the assimilation and accommodation processes..
For Piaget, the acquisition of knowledge, learning, is a constructive process that occurs as a result of the assimilation and accommodation processes carried out by the individual to relate and fit the new contents within their knowledge structures..
The ability to incorporate knowledge or to learn will depend, mainly, on the level of their cognitive development and the number and organization of their schemes..
For Piaget, the activity and development of the child occur at the individual level. For Vygotsky, the development of the child depends, more than on himself, on the people around him.
Vygotsky's ideas are based on two basic premises: first, that social relations in the cultural setting determine the psychological structure and development of the individual..
Second, that instruction must precede development, since mental functions first appear on the social plane, among individuals, and then are internalized and can be performed by one alone. From these two premises are derived a few principles that we find in Vygotsky's theory:
• That development and learning presuppose a social context and a process of interaction. All psychological functions have their origin in an interpersonal framework.
• Development consists of a process of internalization through which the child internally reconstructs any external operation. Psychological processes arise first on an interpersonal plane and then, through internalization, reach the intrapersonal plane.
• Learning goes from the outside to the inside of the student. This principle is called the law of double formation: in the cultural development of the child, every function appears twice: first, between people, and then within the child..
• Development and learning are interdependent, although learning precedes development.
Vygotsky suggests that instruction must take place in the zone of proximal development. Distinguish three levels of knowledge. The zone of real or effective development, which represents the social mediation already internalized by the subject, which the individual does autonomously, without the help or mediation of another. The zone of potential development, which represents what the individual is capable of doing with the help of other people, and the zone of proximal development, which represents the difference between the individual's actual development and potential development.
Learning should be concentrated in the zone of proximal development, where knowledge and development of skills that have not yet been mastered but can be easily mastered with necessary instruction, interaction and aids take place..
Bruner, with Gestalt roots, affirms that the ultimate goal of teaching is to get the student to acquire a general understanding of the structure of an area of knowledge.
They are the following: motivation, structure, sequence and reinforcement.
First Principle: Motivation
It is the condition that predisposes the student towards learning and his interest is only maintained when there is an intrinsic motivation. The reasons that drive the child to learn, especially during the preschool years, are the following:
to. The innate instinct of curiosity. Works automatically from birth.
b. Need to develop their skills. Children show interest in activities in which they feel capable or are successful. Robert White already pointed out that one of the main motives of human beings is the personal desire to control their own environment, and he called it motivation for competition. Competition allows people to live independently. Kagan says that it is possible to observe in children from 9 months the teacher smile, which appears when they finish a task, which presupposes an internal sense of pride for having completed it.
c. Reciprocity. It is also a genetically determined motivation. Supposes the need to work cooperatively with their peers.
Second Principle: The structure
The ultimate goal in teaching content is for the student to understand their fundamental structure: to understand it in such a way that we can relate other things to them significantly.
Knowledge must be optimally structured so that it can be transmitted to students in a simple and understandable way. The structure of any subject is formed by essential information, by fundamental concepts related to each other..
For Bruner, the acquisition of the structure should be the main teaching objective because:
1) makes learning more accessible by providing learners with a big picture,
2) presenting ideas in a simplified and structured way makes retention easier and longer lasting,
3) makes possible an adequate and effective transfer, being possible the establishment of significant relationships with other content, and
4) is a requirement to be able to apply knowledge to problem solving.
Third Principle: Organization and Sequence of the contents
Knowledge must be organized and presented in a way that is consistent with the mode of representation that each student has at a given moment..
Cognitive development according to Bruner goes through three stages: enactive, iconic and symbolic. In the enactive stage, knowledge is represented in actions. This representation is the only one that occurs in young children, and corresponds to Piaget's sensorimotor stage..
The iconic or figurative stage appears when the child is able to imagine objects without having to act on them: he is able to replace the action with an image or a spatial scheme. Although it is limited to the perceptual field, it is already a way of representing information and facilitates the execution of certain tasks. Corresponds to the preoperational stage of Piaget.
The symbolic stage appears when the child is able to express his experiences in linguistic terms. Corresponds to Piaget's thought of concrete operations and formal operations.
For Bruner, the best way to present the contents to the students consists of a sequence that begins with an enactive representation, continues with an iconic representation, and ends with a symbolic representation. These three forms of representation are parallel.
Bruner also defends the spiral curriculum. Instead of the linear curriculum, where students progress in a closed way until they achieve the objectives of a subject, he recommends a spiral teaching where students, as they move up the educational levels, return to already known topics to expand their knowledge.
Teaching must pursue that the student acquires at first the most elementary and basic nucleus of a subject, its fundamental structure, and must repeatedly return to it.
At the base of this approach to the spiral curriculum is the principle that any content can be taught and learned by the child at any age and educational level..
Everything is a conversion problem: it is enough to convert or translate abstract ideas into an intuitive or figurative form, which are within the reach of the student's level of cognitive development so that they can be understood. This idea of the cyclical order in teaching was already defended by Comenius, who argued that in each of the stages of education different contents are not taught, but the same, although in different ways.
But can this be so? Ausubel says that in general it is preferable to restrict the content of the primary school curriculum to content for which the student shows an adequate disposition, even though he could intuitively learn more difficult materials.
On the other hand, Bruner also defends discovery learning, which implies that learning must be inductive, that is, it must start from data, facts and particular situations, experimenting and testing hypotheses. Students should be encouraged to be the ones, through guided discovery, who discover the structure of the subject.
Fourth Principle: Reinforcement
For Bruner, learning is favored through reinforcement: feedback is necessary to master a problem.
Bruner advocates discovery learning, although he admits that rote learning is sometimes appropriate. Ex: multiplication tables. Teaching must seek meaningful learning, which is achieved by establishing the necessary conditions for discovery learning to take place. Bruner insists: students have to learn to discover.
The antecedents of learning by discovery: they are found in the progressive education movement, which advocated a form of teaching in which the center of the educational situation is the student and conceived education as a process where the student learns to learn, to investigate , to discover.
Hence the idea of teaching by action advocated by Dewey. Anderson and Faust say that discovery learning is a form of teaching in which the student is not communicated with the concept or principle to be learned, but is expected to induce or discover the principle from a series of examples.
The only condition necessary to make the discovery lesson successful is that the student is truly capable of discovering for himself the proposed principle. If you cannot discover this principle, it is unlikely that you will develop your own problem-solving skills that you can apply later to discover a new principle..
Bergan and Dunn created a sequence of steps that the classroom teacher should follow when designing their students' learning through discovery learning:
• First, the learning situation should be organized in such a way that the learner is posed with a series of puzzling questions or a problem to be solved. The condition is that the principle to be discovered is accessible to the student.
• Second, the teacher must help and direct the discovery process: guided or directed discovery..
• Third, the teacher must offer feedback so that the student knows when the concept was acquired..
• And finally, based on the successes obtained by the student, the teacher must help him face other problems that make it possible to acquire knowledge and develop his ability to discover.
An essential characteristic in discovery learning is the use made of induction: it consists in proposing particular examples so that the student, based on them, can induce the general principle in which they are included. But the student can also start from a generalization. That is, it is likely that several different processes are involved in the discovery..
The advantages of discovery learning are that students become autonomous in learning and understanding, teaches the student to learn to learn, motivates students, and strengthens students' self-concept and responsibility..
The drawbacks are that it is uncertain and ineffective compared to expository teaching, the teacher assumes an unnatural role by hiding information from some students who arrive at erroneous notions that later will have to be unlearned, it needs very careful planning and structuring, it is a type of teaching-learning that is difficult to carry out with many students, is not effective with slow students and requires many materials.
It is the most prominent theory in the field of learning and teaching in the classroom. Focuses your attention on learning the verbal information that is presented in the printed texts used in school.
The key idea is meaningful learning, which occurs when the student relates the new information with his previous knowledge stored in his cognitive structure. Like Bruner, he believes that the goal of learning is to understand the structure of an area of knowledge.
However, compared to Bruner, who defends learning by discovery that advances inductively, A u s u b e l defends learning by reception, which progresses deductively, from the general to the particular..
For Ausubel, all the learning that takes place in the classroom can be located along two independent dimensions: learning by reception versus learning by discovery and learning by repetition or rote versus significant learning..
Learning by reception occurs when the main content of the learning task is presented (or explained) to the student in its final form and he only has to incorporate it by actively and meaningfully relating it to the most relevant aspects of his cognitive structure..
Discovery learning occurs when the main content of the learning task is not offered to the student, but must be discovered independently by the student before it can be meaningfully assimilated into their cognitive structure.
Repetition learning is mechanical or rote, and occurs when learning consists of purely arbitrary associations. Meaningful learning occurs when the content of the learning is related in a non-arbitrary way (not to the letter), but in a substantial way with the previous knowledge that you already have.
For Ausubel, the mistake of considering that reception learning is repetitive and discovery learning is significant is frequent. Both reception learning and discovery learning can be repetitive or significant, since whether the result is one or the other depends on the conditions in which the learning occurs and how it is carried out.
For Ausubel, the learning to be pursued in the classroom should be meaningful learning by reception, the essence of which is that the ideas expressed symbolically are not related arbitrarily, but substantially (not literally) with what the student already knows.
Meaningful learning occurs when the student substantially relates and integrates the new content or materials that he learns with the knowledge he previously possesses. However, for certain types of learning, repetition and discovery learning may be desirable. Eg: learn vocabulary, foreign language ...
If meaningful learning occurs when the student relates the new content with what he previously possesses, two main conditions are required.
First, a favorable attitude of the student towards meaningful learning: relate the new content with the knowledge of their cognitive structure.
Second, that the task is potentially significant: that the contents are relatable, that they be presented in a way that can be related to previous knowledge. This depends on the nature of the material or content to be learned. It cannot be arbitrary or vague, it must have a logical structure. It also depends on the student's cognitive structure, that is, on the previous knowledge they have and how they are organized in their memory..
Cognitive structure
The cognitive structure is the key piece, since learning consists of assimilating knowledge and this assimilation is the result of the interaction that occurs when the student relates the new information with the pertinent ideas that they already have. Ausubel states that of all the factors that influence learning, the most important is what the student already knows; find out this and teach yourself accordingly.
Finding out what you already know means identifying those elements that exist in the student's repertoire of knowledge that are relevant to what we hope to teach. These elements he calls inclusors.
The cognitive structure consists of the knowledge that a student has and how they are organized in their memory.
It highlights three important variables in cognitive structure:
1) availability of relevant anchoring ideas, related to the content to be learned. This knowledge must be characterized by having an adequate level of generality and inclusiveness;
2) discriminability of said ideas of consolidation of other similar concepts and principles, so as to avoid confusion, and
3) stability and clarity of the ideas of consolidation.
Previous Organizers
When there are no ideas of consolidation in the cognitive structure, the previous organizers must be resorted to, otherwise only repetition learning would be possible. The pre-organizers are introductory materials, appropriately relevant and inclusive, that are presented before the subjects or learning contents so that they can be integrated into the cognitive structure..
They are concepts with a higher level of abstraction, generality and inclusiveness than the new material to be learned. Their presence is essential when the material to be learned is unknown to the student or contains some difficulty.
Ausubel says that the organizers fulfill the following functions: provide a support, an idea or some ideas of consolidation with which the new material can be related and integrated; serve as a cognitive bridge to easily relate what the student already knows and what he needs to know; facilitate a favorable attitude towards meaningful learning and facilitate discriminability.
Ausubel distinguishes three basic types of meaningful learning. Representation learning consists of learning the meaning of symbols, usually words, or what they represent. It is the most basic type of learning, it is necessary for other learning and it is the closest to repetition learning.
Concept learning consists of abstracting the essential and common characteristics or attributes of a certain category of objects. There are two ways. On the one hand, concept formation, concepts are obtained from direct experience with objects, facts or situations. It occurs mainly in young children.
On the other, the assimilation of concepts, which are acquired from definitions or texts in which they are implicit. It is the dominant route from elementary school, adolescence and adulthood.
The learning of propositions consists of learning the meaning of the ideas expressed by a group of words (propositions or sentences) and requires previously the knowledge of the concepts implicit in them.
The forms of meaningful learning refer to the way in which the new content or information is linked or strengthened with the pertinent and pre-existing ideas of its cognitive structure. According to Ausubel there are three different forms: subordinate or inclusive; superordinate and combinatorial.
Learning is subordinate when the content that is learned is linked or incorporated within a concept or a broader and more general idea preexisting in the cognitive structure.
This form of learning is divided into two others. It is derivative if the new information is understood or incorporated as a specific example of the information that the subject already possesses. And it is correlative if the new information is linked as an extension, modification or limitation of the knowledge that the student already possessed..
Learning is superordinate when new information is linked as an idea or a concept that encompasses and encompasses the previous ideas that the student has. Ex: the child can know different colors and can later learn the concept of color. And learning is combinatorial when the new information is related to the ideas that the student previously possesses; but without being linked in a subordinate or superordinate way. Most of the learning that takes place in the classroom is combinatorial learning.
Most of the meaningful learning consists of the assimilation of new content. It depends on both subordinate and superordinate concepts..
Ausubel says that there are two ways to access concepts: training and assimilation. During early childhood education and in the first years of primary education, concepts are acquired through concept formation: abstracting common characteristics from particular experiences.
It is a type of inductive learning, by discovery, in which psychological processes intervene: discrimination, abstraction, differentiation, generation and testing of hypotheses and generalization. Later, from the first years, the concepts are obtained mainly through assimilation: through definitions or texts, where the information is implicit.
Ausubel says that two principles are involved in the assimilation and organization of knowledge in the cognitive structure of the learner: progressive differentiation and integrative reconciliation..
The principle of progressive differentiation refers to the fact that as subordinate learning takes place, the cognitive structure is modified and hierarchically organized and, with this, inclusive concepts develop and become more and more differentiated..
The principle of integrative reconciliation postulates that as superordinate or combinatorial learning takes place, the cognitive structure is modified, which allows establishing new relationships and a new organization between ideas or concepts, and with it, the appearance of new meanings. . Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning has not been criticized. It is the most complete.
Novack talks about the benefits of meaningful learning:
Beltrán: characteristics of meaningful learning: what is cognitive learning, what is socially mediated learning and what is active learning.
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