Meaningful learning

• Learning involves acquiring or modifying ideas, skills, behaviors, or values through study, experience, instruction, reasoning, or observation.

General Characteristics of Learning

• Learning attributes significance and worth to knowledge.

• Learning makes knowledge operative in different contexts.

• Learning allows acquired knowledge to be represented and transmitted to others.

• Knowledge and learning are a result of mental activity.

• Knowledge involves interaction between new information and existing information.

• Learning involves modification or increase of knowledge through experience, maturity, and interaction with the environment, and must be enduring and have an impact in practice, conduct, or both.

The Importance of Meaningful Learning (Ausubel)

• Meaningful learning aims to create an interconnected network of knowledge.
• Individuals possess an organized structure divided into areas of knowledge.
• New knowledge is incorporated and linked to real-life experiences, and is applied in different contexts for retention.
• Variables directly influence a student's cognitive structure.
• The level of generality of anchoring ideas: broad, higher-order anchoring ideas accommodate more specific, lower-order new ideas.
• The clarity and stability of anchoring ideas: clear anchoring ideas lead to more lasting connections with new knowledge.
• The skill to differentiate between similarities and differences of new and anchoring ideas involves grouping similar ideas.

Learning According to Teachers: Five Approaches

• Learning as an increase in the quantity of knowledge involves students receiving and reproducing information, with teachers as the source of knowledge.
• Learning as memorization is when students store teacher-provided information to associate and reproduce it accurately.
• Learning as the acquisition of facts or procedures for use involves associating, reproducing, and applying transmitted knowledge, with teachers providing application opportunities and supervision.
• Learning as abstraction of meanings involves students interpreting and finding meaning in knowledge, supported by teachers in their meaning-making process.
• Learning as an interpretive process directed at understanding reality includes students constructing their knowledge and autonomously applying it, with teachers guiding their learning process.

Three Phases of the Teaching-Learning Process:

• Activation Phase: The main goal is to stimulate the existing awareness in students to prepare them to learn with what will be discussed.

Commonly used techniques in the Activation Phase include:

• Preliminary Organizers. Presenting the structure of the information to the student to offer a guide that allows them to assimilate and integrate new knowledge (e.g., conceptual map, graph, outline, or summary).
• Attention Focus. Set aside time during the session to introduce the topic in an engaging manner; create curiosity (e.g., videos, presentations, activities, etc.).
• Use of Objectives. Make public the objectives that are designed to be met so that students can form a notion of the value of this new learning.
• Development Phase (instruction phase): Its objective is the transfer of knowledge, so that the apprentice is ready to foresee the information described, understand the organization, and relate it to all components.

Feedback Phase

• The objectives of this exchange of impressions include detecting and making the student aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their performance and encouraging the motivation to continue learning.

What to teach?

• Concepts (knowing), procedures (knowing how), and attitudes (knowing how to be) should be taught.

Concepts

• Sets of objects, events, or symbols that share common characteristics. They help categorize and arrange information and offer an explanation of what will come next.
• They connect to previous knowledge and is a gradual learning; meaning is enriched with successive approximations.
• The learning of concepts should be done through the understanding of these (significant learning).
• Networks of Concepts are a set of concepts associated with one another and revealed in a specified order to describe complex content.

Procedures

• These are the collection of actions (tasks, methods, techniques, strategies, etc.) systematically organized and aimed to achieve a goal.
• It involves how to act and to understand how.

Attitudes

• The way we act or think toward a given situation.
• They are learnings gained by social interaction that define how a specific individual will behave.
• Cognitive component (personal experiences and beliefs)
• Emotional component (sentiments and emotions).
• Behavioral component (actions).

Competency-Based Teaching (related to meaningful learning)

• Competence: «A fusion of knowledge, powers and attitudes.»
• It has an extra dynamic character and directs to the functionality of school learnings.

Competencies

• Linguisticcommunication
• Plurilingual
• Mathematical competence and competence in science, technology and engineering (STEM)
• Awareness and cultural expressions
• Digital
• Personal, social and learning to learn
• Citizen
• Entrepreneurial

How to teach?

• Exercise comprises an activity or set of activities decontextualized and not connected to real life that help to gain particular competence.
• Held mechanically and have a prefetermined, specific response. Mandatory to secure and attach information and consist of memorizing, remembering, and reproducing.
• Characteristics:
  • Have no context.
  • They are especially connected to concepts.
  • Are related to certain perceivable actions. Offer little cognitive complexity
• Activity is defined as an action or collection of acts that allow you to assimilate a new knowledge or to work with one that has already been understood in a unique form.
• Demand the interpretation of contents, as well as making settlements on the performance that is to be used.
• Features:
  • Have a greater setting
  • Are linked directly to curriculum purposes.
  • Are related to thinking operations; Therefore, they involve greater complexity.
• Task can be described as an action or set of circumstances, setting and related to real life, designed to solve an issue situations via complex thinking.
• Demand the combination of all prior acquired knowledge, as well as the implementation of numerous competencies at once.
• Elements:
  • Are fully situated in any life activity.
  • The final product has community relevance.
  • Are strongly connected to competencies.
  • Offer a high measure of cognitive difficulty.

Curriculum Presentation and Analysis

• Curriculum: Group of objectives, competencies, contents expressed in the form of basic knowledge, pedagogical methods, and evaluation criteria of ESO/Bach that replace the curriculum of this stage.
• Programming: Group of actions by which the most general educational intentions are transformed into concrete didactic proposals that allow achieving the expected objectives.

Four levels of curricular concretion:

• State level: laws, royal decrees.
• Autonomous Communities level: decrees and orders.
• School level: school educational project (PEC) and annual general programming (PGA).
• Teaching team level: teaching program (PD).
• Teacher level: classroom programming (PA). The teacher implements curricular adaptations in their classroom.

Specific Measures for Attention to Diversity

• Attention to diversity can be defined as the set of actions carried out to adapt the teaching-learning process to the characteristics, needs, and potentials of all students.
• To address student diversity and promote inclusive education, the Universal Learning Design (ULD) is proposed.

Non-Significant Curricular Adaptations (ACI)

• These are ordinary measures that the teacher can apply to any student who needs it, and they have both a preventive and compensatory character.

Actions to Take:

• Methodological modifications. Use of methodologies that favor the learning of all students, flexible and heterogeneous groupings, different materials for the same content, adapt or select the activities for a specific student, etc.
• Timeline. Give a student more time to perform an activity, make their schedules more flexible to facilitate their use of classes, etc.
• Techniques or assessment tools. Conduct oral exams, include pictograms in the assessment trials, highlight the key words in the statement.

Significant Curricular Adaptations (ACIS).

• They must be carried out for a specific student who presents special educational needs recognized in a psycho-pedagogical evaluation and has a report that specifies it.

These adaptations should be characterized by:

• Principle of normalization
• Principle of personalization
• Principle of collaboration
• Principle of flexibility

Curricular Diversification Programs

• Measures for attention to diversity that can be implemented from the 3rd year of ESO.
• These programs are implemented at the end of the 2nd year of ESO when students are not in a position to advance to the 3rd year.
• An assessment by the teaching staff and the guidance team must be carried out for this purpose.