Abstract:

The development of skills in higher education is one of the greatest challenges facing different universities in the world. This coupled with the increase in accessibility to higher education has resulted in a growth in student enrollment to private universities. These students who are adults, fathers, mothers or from ethnic groups, come for the most part from adverse or at risk contexts and have a low cultural background (Araneda-Guirriman, et al., 2018). Another trait that makes them stand out is that they are the first generation to attend university, (O'Shea, 2016; Southgate and Bennett, 2014), characterization that has given rise to a new profile of university students. This trend can also be observed in Chile, where an increasing demand in undergraduate education over the last three decades has accorded (Espinoza and González, 2017), leaving these entities with the responsibility to take over the remedial actions to strengthen the cognitive shortcomings that these students bring; shortcomings that have been verified in the diagnostic tests which are applied when entering the university. The results show that students fail to demonstrate the acquisition of higher thinking cognitive levels (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001) specifically in the areas of knowledge of language and mathematics. Reaching the highest taxonomic level is possible through the implementation of strategies that enhance the development of higher thinking skills. This is a task that must be assumed by the universities that have received this new student profile; that is to say, prepare them for the academic requirements and university world (Araneda-Guirriman et al., 2017).

In order to understand this problem and be able to develop superior cognitive abilities, a study was carried out in a private university in Santiago, Chile, with the objective of identifying the learning strategies used by students who access higher education today. For this purpose, a qualitative methodology was used, through a case study, with a selected and intentional sample of 35 students of the English Teacher Training program in the curricular activity of Evaluation for the Learning during the first semester of 2019. Two tests measuring cognitive strategies were applied (Beas at el, 2011). One was used to determine the ability of a student to create their own opinion based on ideas and visions of other authors (Perspective Analysis) and the other was a strategy test to distinguish the main elements of information, identify a general pattern and transfer it to other phenomena (Abstraction), which was reviewed with an instrument for carrying out tasks (rubrics).

Regarding the results, the abstraction was one of the strategies that turned out to be more complex than the analysis of perspective. This was because in abstraction they had to create a new title, elaborate questions for each vision of the authors and synthesize the essential ideas of the text.

Finally, this is an input for teachers regarding the capacity for abstraction that the new profile of students who access higher education have. This input presents the necessity that teachers need to be trained in higher thinking development strategies so that they not only plan, teach, demonstrate and implement these higher thinking skills but also transfer them to learners so they can apply them in different situations.

Keywords:

Higher education, thinking strategies, cognitive skills, new profile.