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Resumen
Una de las demandas psicopedagógicas más importantes del profesor de Educación Secundaria se centra en cómo abordar nuevas estrategias para “enseñar a aprender” a los alumnos. Tanto la acción tutorial del profesor como la intervención psicopedagógica se han orientado tradicionalmente hacia la enseñanza de “técnicas de estudio”. Recientemente, se están popularizando otro tipo de actuaciones focalizadas más bien en el desarrollo de los prerrequisitos cognitivos del alumno mediante la implemntación de los llamados “Programas de Enseñar a Pensar”. En este trabajo hemos comparado la eficacia de estos dos tipos de programas en cuanto a su capacidad para mejorar las estrategias de comprensión del alumno, y en relación a una tercera propuesta que integra componentes de ambos y añade otros elementos que pueden posibilitar su mejor aprovechamien to en contextos curriculares, especialmente en el marco de los “Programas de Diversificación Curricular” del sistema educativo español.
Abstract
One of the most important demands made on Secondary Education teachers is how to approach new strategies for teaching students “how to learn”. Both tutorials and educational intervention have been traditionally guided toward teaching study techniques. Recently, other types of actions are becoming popular. They focus on developing students' prerequisite cognitive strategies through implementing “Teaching to Think Programmes”. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of these two programmes in terms of their ability to improve students' comprehension strategies. The research study also tests a third proposal that integrates components of the two training programmes, and includes other elements that could facilitate its use in curricular contexts, particularly within the framework of Curricular Diversification Programmes of the Spanish educational system.
Extended Summary
One of the most important demands made on Secondary Education teachers is how to approach new strategies for teaching students “how to learn”. Both tutorials and educational intervention have been traditionally guided toward teaching study techniques. Recently, other types of actions are becoming popular. They focus on developing students' prerequisite cognitive strategies through implementing “Teaching to Think Programmes”. In this paper, we compare the efficiency of these two programmes in terms of their ability to improve students' comprehension strategies. The research study also tests a third proposal that integrates components of the two training programmes, and includes other elements that could facilitate its use in curricular contexts, particularly within the framework of Curricular Diversification Programmes of the Spanish educational system.
In the experiment, 35 subjects with learning problems, between 16 and 18 years old, from three different secondary schools took part. The independent variable were three treatments, lasting fifteen hours each, related to the different intervention approaches described above. The dependent variables were several aspects indicating the strategic and inferential activity that the students need to display during reading expository texts. Our aim was to analyse the construction of the “text base” and the “situational model”.
The results show the scarce usefulness of programmes focusing on study techniques with low performance pupils, particularly with respect to making inferences characteristic of deep levels of comprehension. Moreover, the poor results obtained after the application of Harvard University's Intelligence Program lead us to doubt that general strategies—such as, comparisons, classifications, logical reasoning,…—trained using “content-free” tasks are spontaneously transferred after such a brief instruction, outside the curriculum.
However, the alternative proposal Strategic Intervention in Levels (S.I.L.) has shown clear improvements in the strategies subjects used to study social science academic texts, as well as their comprehension and verbal expression capacities. Furthermore, this change has taken place without investing an amount of time or resources that are not already contemplated in secondary Education curricular designs.
To conclude, the results reveal the weaknesses of programmes designed around the instruction of semantic strategies or study techniques, aimed at extracting the text's main idea. In contrast, other alternatives focused on a structural text analysis provide more effective tools for developing reasoning and comprehension capacities.