El aprendizaje significativo

Constructivist Theories.
In the view of constructivist, learning is a constructive process in which the learner is building an internal illustration of knowledge, a personal interpretation ofexperience. This representation is continually open to modification, its structure and linkages forming the ground to which other knowledge structures are attached. Learning is an active process in whichmeaning is accomplished on the basis of experience. This view of knowledge does not necessarily reject the existence of the real world, and agrees that reality places constrains on the concepts thatare, but contends that all we know of the world are human interpretations of our experience of the world. Conceptual growth comes from the sharing of various perspectives and the simultaneouschanging of our internal representations in response to those perspectives as well as through cumulative experience (Bednar, Cunnigham, Duffy, Perry, 1995).

The fundamental challenge of construcivism isin its changing the locus of control over learning from the teacher to the student. Educational technologists, with their foundations in behavioural psychology, have sought to design programs insuch a way that students would be enticed to achieve prespecified objectives. Constructivists have said that this violates both what we know now about the nature of learning (situated, interactive) andabout the nature of knowledge (perspectival, conventional, tentative, evolutionary). They have claimed that objectives should be negotiated with students based on their own felt needs, thatprogrammed activities should emerge from within the contexts of their lived worlds, that students should work together with peers in the social construction of personally significant meaning, and thatevaluation should be a personalised ongoing, shared analysis of progress (Hanckbarth,S., 1996, p.11).

Agreeing with this view of knowledge, learning must be placed in a rich context, reflective of real...