TEACHER ROOM: Strategies, of learning

Learning strategies are today, from the pedagogical point of view, one or the most important resources that educators can use to improve student learning. A summarized vision of the strategies requires consideration of the following sections: pedagogical sense, nature, classification and teaching.

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There are many factors that have contributed to highlighting the role of learning strategies in recent years. Among the most directly related to them are the following: the drop in performance at all levels of education, the decrease in the student population and the consequent flexibility of the systems of access to university studies, the lack of training in the skills of learning in elementary and secondary school studies, and the verification of different strategies between students with high and low performance, or between experts and beginners, in different areas.

However, these and many other reasons would have been unable to encourage a movement like the one we discussed, if we had not allied ourselves with a great scientific effort whose most representative exponents are the studies on intelligence, the new concept of learning and experiences educational in natural environments. All this has helped to discover in the strategies of learning that it was sought to give coherence to work in educational practice.

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Strategies are a type of rules that allow you to make the right decisions at any time within a certain process. Defined in this general way, the strategies belong to that type of knowledge called procedural, which refers to how things are done (for example, how to make a summary), compared to another type of knowledge, called declarative, which refers to what things are (what is a curriculum).

This refers to the mental activities or operations that the student can carry out to facilitate and improve their task, whatever the scope or content of the learning. Learning strategies, understood in this way, are no more than the thought operations that face the task of learning.

We can imagine strategies such as the great thinking tools put in place by the student when he has to understand a text, acquire knowledge or solve problems. Now, given that learning is really the imprint of thought, it could be said that the quality of learning does not occur so much because of the quality of the teacher's activities, but rather because of the quality of the student's actions.

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And is that if the student, whatever the quality of the instruction, is limited to repeat or reproduce the knowledge, the learning will be merely repetitive. And if the student selects, organizes and elaborates knowledge (that is, uses strategies), learning ceases to be repetitive in order to be constructive and meaningful.

In particular, it is important to distinguish between processes, strategies and techniques. In the term learning process it is used to identify the general chain of macroactivities or mental operations involved in the act of learning such as, for example, attention, understanding, acquisition, reproduction or transfer. These are covert activities, little visible and difficult to manage.

The techniques at the other extreme are easily visible, operational and manipulable activities, such as making a summary or a schema. Between the two extremes, the processes and the techniques, are the strategies, which are not as visible as the techniques nor as covert as the processes. Thus, for example, the organization of the informative data that the student performs to understand the hidden meaning in them is not as visible as the summary technique or as covert as the comprehension process.

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On the other hand, strategies can not be reduced to mere study techniques, since students, with little luck, have tried. The strategies have an intentional and intentional character; it implies, therefore, and inherently, a plan of action, as opposed to the technique, which is remarkably mechanical and routine.

If the student wants to understand a message from informative data, he can use a selection strategy that helps him separate the relevant from the irrelevant, and for that;

you can use a technique as underline; or you can use an organizational strategy that puts order in the data, and for this you can use a technique like the conceptual map, or use a development strategy that allows you to compare new knowledge with prior knowledge, and for this you can use such a technique effective as the interrogation.

In all three cases, it is the same learning process, meaningful understanding, which can be achieved through different strategies: selection, organization or elaboration, each of which can use, in turn, different techniques (underlining, conceptual map , interrogation). ..). The strategies are at the service of the process and the techniques are at the service of the strategies.

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Strategies are the best thought tools that empower and extend their action wherever they act. The learning strategies are related to the quality of the student's learning, which allows identifying and diagnosing the causes of low or high school performance. It is possible that two students who have the same intellectual potential, the same instructional system and the same degree of motivation use different learning strategies and, therefore, achieve different levels of performance.

The identification of the strategies used will diagnose the cause of these differences in performance and improve learning.

In this sense, the strategies offer education a new type of technology especially efficient for educational intervention.

With learning strategies it is possible to design, with great probabilities of efficiency, the triple task that educational action has always dreamed of: preventing, optimizing and recovering.

Prevent, identify in the student the ineffective strategies at the moment of the performance and change them for more efficient ones;
Optimize, improve the effective strategies already used by the student;
Recover, identifying the strategies responsible for poor performance or helping them to use them better if they have been used inappropriately.

Finally, the strategies promote independent and independent learning, so that the reins and control of learning pass from the hands of the teacher into the hands of the students.