To learn, two conditions are necessary: willing, which is a problem of motivation, which is specified in motives, causal attributions, expectations, self-completion and attitudes and interests, and power, which is a problem of ability, which is specified in previous knowledge , in intelligence and cognitive style.
Learning strategies can be understood from two different perspectives: as a necessary factor for learning or as a result of it. In this second we find the cognitive strategies in Gagné as one of the learning outcomes, as learned skills that enable the student to control their own learning, retention and thinking processes, and from them it is derived that the student learns to think.
Learning is a complex process that requires a succession of phases, the activation of certain mental processes and the performance of certain activities. Gagné points out that each of the learning phases is associated with one or more internal processes and that these processes can be influenced by certain events.
Learning requires activating certain processes (attention, coding, retention ...) and at the same time making use of strategies to ensure their effectiveness. To put the strategies into practice we can help ourselves with some techniques.
Beltrán summarizes the definitions, which he understands as mental activities or operations used to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge, pointing out some characteristics: 1) it is a type of intentional or purposeful activity that implies a goal-oriented plan of action, 2 ) It is a deliberate and consciously planned activity, 3) It involves some type of selection between different options in order to ensure the efficiency of the execution of the task.
Beltrán also distinguishes between process, strategy and techniques. The process is used to designate the mental operations involved in the act of learning (attention, understanding…) without which no learning can take place. They are covert activities, little visible and difficult to manipulate.
Strategies are operations through which processes are carried out, which gives rise to different strategies, more or less effective, to activate said processes. Ex: retention is best achieved through organizational strategy. The techniques are the procedures to carry out the strategies: underline, summary ... The strategies are at the service of the processes, and the techniques are at the service of the strategies. For Schmeck and Shunck, strategies are procedures or plans and techniques are specific procedures..
Other authors distinguish between skills and strategies. According to Gagné, intellectual abilities are capacities that make man competent to interact with his environment through symbolic representations, and he distinguishes four types of intellectual abilities: discriminations, concepts, rules and higher-order rules, hierarchized from less to greater complexity..
Cognitive strategies are capacities that the student uses to control and govern the processes involved in learning. Ex: when to understand a text we select the relevant information. Skills, therefore, must be understood as capacities to perform tasks.
Skills are necessary conditions for learning and refer to the different capacities that make up intelligence and are the result of the willingness or ability that individuals demonstrate to do something, while strategies are aimed at developing skills.
Dansereau classifies them according to three dimensions: general-specific, allogarithmic-heuristic and primary-support, the latter giving rise to two groups. On the one hand, the primary strategies, which act on the material to be learned and refer to processes of understanding, retention, retrieval and use of the material..
On the other, support strategies, which affect the student to maintain the appropriate cognitive tone for learning and refer to planning, concentration and control of behavior.
Weinstein and Mayer have proposed a classification that has been the most accepted. Repetition strategies consist of the active repetition of the material to be learned.
Organizational strategies consist of giving structure to the material to be learned: summarizing it, dividing it, concept maps ... they allow making the material a coherent and organized whole.
The elaboration strategies consist of establishing connections or integrating the new contents that are learned with the information that we already have in memory: paraphrasing, devising analogies or some mnemonic method.
Comprehension control strategies have the objective of making the student aware of the course of their learning, so that they can evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies used, correct what is necessary and guide the behavior to the desired goals: planning, setting goals, formulating questions… And affective strategies aim to establish and maintain motivation, concentrate and maintain attention, reduce anxiety and control time effectively.
Beltrán divides the strategies taking into account two criteria: their nature and their function. Taking into account its nature, it distinguishes two strategies: metacognitive and supportive; and according to their function they can be classified into as many groups as processes involved in learning.
Taking into account these criteria, it classifies them as 4. The support strategies are at the service of raising the awareness of the student towards learning tasks and provide the minimum conditions for meaningful learning to occur..
This awareness has three areas: motivation, attitudes and affection. The processing strategies are at the service of the coding, retention and reproduction of the informational materials. They are selection, organization and preparation strategies. Personalization strategies are related to creativity, critical thinking, retrieval, and transfer. Strategies: creativity, critical thinking, recovery and transfer.
And metacognitive strategies plan and supervise the action of cognitive strategies and have a double function: knowledge and control. They are strategies for planning, self-regulation and control, and for evaluation.
Thus, strategies are intentional, deliberate and consciously planned activities, aimed at controlling and governing the processes involved in learning in order to ensure efficiency in the execution of tasks..
The knowledge construction process consists of relating the new information with the previous knowledge stored in the cognitive structure. To achieve effective learning, the student must be able to separate the relevant information from the irrelevant.
This is the first step in any knowledge acquisition process: the selection of relevant information or data in order to simplify and reduce its length so that it can be processed more easily and in depth. The most common selection techniques are shown below.
UNDERLINED
It consists of highlighting, within a text, the ideas that the reader considers most important. It is the technique most used by students, at least at the university levels. It is an effective technique but if done inexperiencedly, it can lead to problems..
Too much underlining reduces its effectiveness, it must be selective. On the other hand, although greater recall of the underlined sentences is achieved, there is little recall of the non-underlined material. This requires in the student the ability to underline the most general sentences that collect the fundamental content of the text and that help to remember subordinate ideas. Its use is more appropriate after a first reading of all the material.
Devine affirms that to be more effective it is accompanied by annotations in the margin.
RESUME
The goal is to capture the essential ideas of the text while reducing its length. The summary can advance some aspects of the organizational strategies, since a well-done summary should imply an organization from greater to less inclusive of the selected ideas.
An effective summary requires in the student the ability to filter the information that the text offers, distinguish the important ideas and synthesize the main ideas in a new coherent organization that condenses the information of the original text.
The steps in writing an abstract are: 1) delete trivial and unnecessary material, 2) eliminate redundant material, 3) categorize, that is, substitute with a more general term, 4) select the general topic sentence, and 5) devise and write a general sentence. A summary is not appropriate if it limits itself to copying the main ideas of the text and fails to combine them from greater to less inclusive. For this reason, it is advisable to teach and train students in the realization of hierarchical summaries..
Training may consist of five steps: 1) explain what a hierarchical summary is, what it is useful for, and when it can be used, 2) demonstrate how to do a hierarchical summary, 3) work with students to prepare hierarchical summaries, 4) progressively reduce the help provided to students and 5) correct individual summaries as a group.
EXTRACTION OF MAIN IDEAS
The main idea of the text is that idea that summarizes the content of a text. It is essential for understanding, since if students do not know how to discriminate the relevant ideas from the irrelevant ones, they will not be able to successfully face the learning task.
Meaningful learning requires not only discriminating relevant ideas from irrelevant ones, but distinguishing them according to their level of inclusiveness.
The ability to identify main ideas is not found in young or inexperienced readers, but is easy to acquire.
Some authors have devised instructional procedures in 5 steps: 1) presentation of the type of skills to be learned, 2) presentation of examples of it, 3) direct teaching of how it is achieved, 4) application of the principles learned under the direction of the instructor, 5) realization of practical exercises by the student.
SCHEME
It is a technique similar to the summary and has the same objective: to capture the essential ideas of the text and reduce its length. But it has two differences: the degree to which the ideas in the text are made explicit and the way to organize those ideas..
While in the summary and synthesize main ideas in a coherent new wording, the outline presents the ideas in the form of a structure, in which the general and main ideas are highlighted and, linked to them by lines, braces or with more pronounced indentations, subordinate ideas are located. Its objective is to highlight the logical structure of the main ideas through the presentation itself. The scheme essentializes the information and requires an organization of it, which favors its assimilation and memory.
The functions of repetition are that it allows information to be retained in short-term memory for an indefinite period of time and that it helps to transfer information to long-term memory. Repetition strategies are intended to actively keep information in short-term memory, reciting or naming it repeatedly, so that it can be transferred to long-term memory. They are very old strategies and very frequently used by students.
Authors such as Pozo conceptualize repetition as an associative strategy that is effective when materials have no meaning, but is very primitive with meaningful materials..
Repetition not only has quantitative effects (remembering more information), but can also help the student discover the structure of the content and use that structure as a scaffold to select and remember information from the text.
Even Ausubel says that the importance of practice and repetition for meaningful learning and retention has been underestimated without justification just because it is considered a hallmark of rote learning..
Beltrán distinguishes two forms of repetition. The maintenance repetition is the most elementary, and its objective is to maintain disconnected data in short-term memory. Elaborative repetition is a superior form of repetition in which there is already the purpose of retaining the information, so an attempt is made to relate the data to other knowledge stored in memory..
However, even if the data lack connections with each other, people who repeat new information remember more than those who do not, since repetition favors learning in two ways: shortly after initial learning and before the occurrence of the problem. forgetting, it allows to consolidate the learned material, and after forgetting occurs, it allows to avoid the confusion of similar ideas. It also allows the student's attention and effort to be focused on those parts of the task that are more difficult to retain..
The repetition strategy appears early in children, although at first they use it in a piecemeal way, and therefore it is not very useful, so it needs to be learned. Repetition is hardly found before five or six years, after seven it appears with some regularity, and after ten it appears as a common strategy.
The conditions that determine the effectiveness of the repetition are the frequency of the review, both with nonsense material and with significant material and its distribution. When it comes to learning motor skills, such as playing the piano or when it comes to learning certain verbal content such as vocabulary, repetition is essential. Sessions should be long enough to ensure learning, but not too long so that they are not boring.
The greater efficacy of distributed practice compared to concentrated practice was already shown by Ebbinghaus, who found that the distribution of sessions over time produced better effects than grouping them in a single trial.
For Ausubel, distributed practice is also more effective than mass practice. However, this advantage depends on factors such as age, ability of the student, nature, quantity and difficulty of the learning task. The advantages of distributed practice are greater with small and less capable students, or with broad, insignificant and difficult content, but not with older and more capable students, or with short, meaningful and easy tasks.
But there are tasks that require long periods of "warm-up" or considerable concentrated effort, in which case distributed practice is less effective than massive.
The objective is to combine, group or relate the selected informative content to each other in a coherent and meaningful structure. When in our short-term memory we find a series of elements or ideas that lack organization, we tend to impose it before transferring them to long-term memory. Grouping words into categories is a common feature of the memorization process.
For Klausmeier, the organization has two important objectives: one is to separate or chop the information, when it is large, into smaller quantities called chunks to facilitate learning. Ex: we memorize a phone not like this 955103056 but like this 955.10.30.56.
Remember that seven is the average number of items that people can keep in short-term memory. The second objective is to establish connections between elements that do not have a logical relationship. One way to impose meaning on a set of disconnected items is by searching for categories to group them together. Let's now see the techniques.
CLASSIFICATION
It is the most basic technique to organize a learning material in related units or fragments. According to Beltrán, the types of classification in which a text can be organized are three: taxonomies, which can be used when the content of a text contains logical interrelations, typological classification and multidimensional classifications. These are the most frequent, the classifications will be determined by the content of the text. Eg: cause-effect relationships, similarities, differences ...
KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS (NETWORKING)
Designed by Dansereau, it consists of identifying its important concepts or ideas (nodes) in a text and then identifying their interrelationships (connections) and representing them in the form of semantic or knowledge networks. This author has identified three classes of structures: hierarchies, chains and cluster that give rise to six types of connections.
Hierarchies result in connection in terms of part where the content of the bottom node is part of the top. Eg: hand-finger and connection in terms of type, where the content of the lower node is a class of the upper one. Ex: public-school.
Strings give rise to connection in terms of cause or instrument, where the content of one node is cause or instrument of the other. Ex: practice- perfection. Clusters give rise to connection in terms of analogy: the content of one node is similar to another. Eg: university-company, connection in terms of characteristic or trait, where the content of one node is a characteristic of the other. Eg: sky-blue and connection in terms of evidence, where the content of one node provides evidence or confirmation of the other. Ex: broken arm- X-ray.
TOP LEVEL STRUCTURES
It was developed by Meyer to be used with expository texts. It consists of organizing the content of a text in a tree or outline structure whose elements are related based on five higher-level structures.
Learning this technique involves knowing how to discriminate these structures and identify in a given text which is the underlying structure. The 5 types of structures that he proposed are: covariation or causality: causal relationship between elements or ideas; comparison: relationship of similarity or difference between objects or ideas; collection or sequence: several objects or ideas constitute a temporal or spatial sequence; description: some ideas serve as an explanation or detail of the previous ones; and answer or problem-solution: some ideas are the answer or solution of the others.
CONCEPTUAL MAPS
Devised by Novack and Gowin, it is used to select the main ideas or concepts of a text, and to represent those concepts by interrelating them in the form of propositions. The characteristics are: 1) they are an instrument to represent, in a graphic, schematic and structured way, the ideas of a text, 2) the representation of the relationships between the concepts is done in a hierarchical way and 3) they help to organize the contents and their assimilation and memory.
For its preparation it is necessary to identify the specific concepts and discover the relationships they present between them. Then a graphical representation is built in which these concepts appear with the expression of their relationships. Concept maps have the characteristic of being hierarchical, and subsequently the possibility of presenting them in the form of a chained spider has also been suggested..
The elaboration consists of relating the new contents that are learned with the previous knowledge that we have stored in memory in order to facilitate retention and recall. Elaboration consists of adding meaning to the new information by relating it to the information stored in the MLP. By relating a new content to another we increase its meaning.
The techniques are very varied, but they have in common that they favor that new information is related to previous experiences and knowledge. The most suggested techniques are the following.
ELABORATIVE INTERROGATION
It involves asking the reason for the events referred to in the text. These questions fulfill three functions: it concentrates the student's attention, favors the organization of the material and activates the necessary processes for the integration of the new information..
ANALOGIES
It is used more as a teaching technique than as a learning technique.
A distinction must be made between the analogies proposed by the teacher, which facilitate the understanding of the information transmitted, which would be teaching techniques, and the analogies generated by the students, which would be learning techniques. But these are not sufficiently studied as a learning technique.
MNEMOTECHNICAL PROCEDURES
These techniques are effective when the materials to be learned are of little significance. It consists of associating the materials to be learned with images or with more significant semantic elements. It had its origin in the orators of ancient Greece and Rome.
But these techniques have been discouraged because they are too artificial, complex, and do not lead to meaningful learning. However, in recent years some interest has resurfaced. Four mnemonic techniques are as follows.
a) Loci method (of places)
It requires two steps. First, memorize a series of familiar places, in successive order. Eg: some rooms in our house, with the outstanding objects that are in them. Second: memorize the stimuli you want to learn by placing them in each of the object-places on our list of mental images and establishing a strong and strange association between them..
b) Peg method (hook or hanger)
It consists of learning by heart a list of words that function as hooks or hangers from which the stimuli to be learned are hung.
The hangers must be easily remembered in order (eg on p. 75). The new stimuli are associated to form a visual image, better if it is surprising and strange, with each of the words in the previous list. It is very easy to use.
c) Keyword method (keyword)
It requires making use of two elements: a sound (acoustic link) and a visual image (imaginative link). It began to be used as a technique for teaching vocabulary of a foreign language and is also useful for learning the meaning of unknown words from the language itself..
It has two phases. To remember a stimulus (foreign word) we look for a Spanish word with a similar sound. Then an association is devised through a visual image between the meaning of the foreign word and the word of our language..
d) Loop or chain method
It consists of devising, successively, a visual image of each of the stimuli to be learned and connecting each new image with the previous one, so that the visual image of each one reminds us of the next one..
The supportive or affective strategies are at the service of the student's sensitization towards learning tasks. Their purpose is to improve the material and psychological conditions in which this learning is reduced. They are teaching strategies (facilitated by the teacher) rather than learning (generated by the student).
This awareness of the student towards learning tasks covers three areas: motivation, attitudes and affection. Of motivation, it refers specifically to the intrinsic. Beltrán proposes four strategies that can contribute to making a more interesting activity.
The challenge is a challenge for the student, they are those of intermediate difficulty. Curiosity is stimulated when tasks are presented in surprising, incongruous, or dissonant ways with respect to one's personal ideas. Control will depend on what he does, on his effort and degree of involvement in the task. And fantasy stimulates achievement motivation.
Regarding attitudes, Beltrán points out three areas of intervention: learning climate, feeling of security and personal satisfaction, and involvement in learning tasks. Regarding affect, the strategies will be aimed at controlling anxiety. When prevention is not enough, the indicated techniques would be systematic desensitization, self-control and shaping..
The main objective is the planning and supervision of the action of cognitive strategies. In the Weinstein and Mayer classification they are called compression control strategies, and refer to the knowledge and control of the processes and strategies and procedures used in PI.
The term metacognition was introduced by cognitive psychology after Flavell coined the term metamemory to refer to the knowledge and control of thinking and learning activities. Therefore it has a double function: knowledge and control, which coincides with the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge..
The knowledge (know what) that the student has about the processes and skills involved in learning and the strategies and techniques that are needed, will help them use their resources more effectively. The fields in which research on metacognitive strategies has been most developed according to Beltrán are:
• Attention (meta-attention): knowing that attention does not occur automatically, that it can be affected by motivation and other external stimuli.
• Comprehension (metacompression): knowledge of the variables that intervene in the meaningful compression of the learning contents.
• Memory (metamemory): knowledge and control of memory processes.
Knowledge about control (knowing how and when) refers to the fact that the student has to be aware of the objectives to be achieved, has to evaluate the successes that are being achieved and introduce appropriate corrections and adaptations.
Within this group of knowledge control activities, there are three main ones. Planning takes place before starting the execution of the task, which consists of a reflection on the objective to be achieved and on the strategies to be used.
Regulation occurs during the execution of the learning task, and aims at self-direction and control of knowledge. The purpose of the evaluation is to check the effectiveness of the learning process.
One of the best known methods for teaching students learning strategies is the MURDER, which aims to provide students with training in learning strategies and study skills. It is a version of the previous SQ3R and SQ4R methods. The SQ3R method, devised by Robinson, consisted of:
1. Inspect the material: read the title and any introductory material to find out the general idea and activate the previous ideas related to it. Titles, graphics, and illustrations help in this endeavor.
2. Ask yourself to identify the information that is likely to be obtained from the reading. Titles are helpful in identifying questions.
main and do practical exercises to ensure understanding of the material.
The later version is the SQ4R, which adds an R for reflection after reading, which suggests thinking about examples and mental images of the content and making connections with the previous knowledge you have on the subject.
Later Dansereau developed a version similar to the previous ones: the M U R D E R. The objectives are: 1) to teach them support strategies in order to achieve and maintain a favorable study climate, 2) to teach study strategies that allow the student to make adequate use of the material and achieve its understanding and storage. The novelty of this version is the introduction of support strategies, which cover three aspects: strategies to establish goals and time the study, strategies for concentration and strategies for the control and evaluation of the study.
The six steps included in the method have the following goals:
1. Mood: establish a climate and state of mind that favors the disposition towards the study.
two . Understand: understand the information, implies the use of comprehension strategies.
Strategies to learn effectively are not given to us, we have to learn them. The teacher must teach learning strategies so that the student can learn independently.
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