Resumen de La competencia "aprender a aprender" en un contexto educativo de ingeniería
The objective of this thesis was to establish bases to characterize "learn to learn" competence and to promote it in an engineering educational context. It adopted the vision of educational psychology that establishes self-regulation in learning as the operative manifestation of this competence. The research was developed in three phases: obtaining a psychometric tool to characterize self-regulation in learning; the characterization of self-regulation in learning of the students; and, based on the results of the characterization, an educational intervention was designed, implemented and evaluated to facilitate that students use the learning strategy of selection and organization of the information .
In the first phase in order to obtain the psychometric tool was translated, adapted and validated the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire - MSLQ following the guidelines of the International Test Commission (ITC). The result was the MSLQ-Colombia. With the participation of 1218 students and 12 engineering professors, the psychometric properties of MSLQ-Colombia were studied: construct validity, content validity, external validity and reliability; the MSLQ-Colombia was valid and reliable.
In the characterization, second phase, the self-regulation of the motivation and the use of learning strategies of 1268 students were evaluated. It was found that students self-regulate their motivation highly: beliefs about learning control and task value were the aspects most self-regulated, while the learning orientation toward extrinsic goals and anxiety in the assessment were the least self-regulated. It was found that students used learning strategies in a non-uniform way, there were strategies frequently used and others occasionally used. The three strategies most used were the monitoring of learning, control of the place of study and effort regulation; the strategies least used were time management and selection and organization of information. The results of this phase also allowed to propose a new hypothesis to investigate the self-regulation in the learning: the self-regulation of some aspects of the motivation and the use of some strategies depend on the subject that the students are coursing; on the contrary, other aspects of motivation and other learning strategies do not depend on the subject.
Educational intervention, the third phase, consisted in offering instruction at students on summarizing technique to facilitate them to select and organize the information of engineering technical texts; in addition, students practiced the production of abstracts and the teachers provided them feedback on the quality of these abstracts. The effects of the educational intervention were explored with a quasi-experimental investigation (experimental group: 177 students, control group: 65 students) that collected quantitative and qualitative evidences. The educational intervention facilitated that students increase positive and significantly, in a statistical sense, the writing of abstracts to select and organize the information; the quality of the abstracts also significantly improved. The intervention also impacted the use of strategies such as metacognition and resource management as time management.
The results of this thesis provide solutions to the current problems of the "learn to learn" competence: practical contributions such as the MSLQ-Colombia and the didactic sequence of the educational intervention, empirical contributions such as the psychometric indexes of MSLQ-Colombia, the characterization of the self-regulation in learning of students and the impacts of educational intervention. Finally, this thesis sets a new integrative approach (hypothesis) of the previous ones about the research on the self-regulation in learning.
