Abstract:

Thanks to the recent technological advances today we have more electronic resources that have enabled the emergence of new forms of learning, so we wonder if engineering students are making use of these resources to achieve meaningful learning, or these resources represent distractors instead. In our experience we have observed that most students prefer to review the topics already digested and if possible highly summarized, therefore that learning process represents a minimal effort to them. On the other hand we find it difficult to encourage to the new generations the motivation required to complement the topics on their own and go beyond knowledge that can be transmitted in the short periods at classroom. Although this issue is quite complex due to the large amount of factors influencing it -such as previous knowledge, sociocultural context, and socioeconomic status, just to name a few-, we believe that some of the most important factors for a successful teaching-learning process are the professor’s teaching method and the theoretical and practical nature of a learning unit. For example, talking about meaningful learning, there is the possibility that the student does not know the practical usefulness of the course and the professor fails in transmitting it, which could be reflected in a lack of motivation and interest on the student and maybe he completes the course with a negligible learning. The opposite case, when the professor is able to transfer to students the importance of the subject and develops scenarios in which the student clearly identify the acquired knowledge applicability for solving problems related to their professional performance, he will encourage them to appropriate that knowledge and to play a more active role in the teaching-learning process. In this paper we present a study of some factors that could affect or benefit the acquisition of meaningful learning. To that end we have designed a tool in order to find out the opinion of students regarding the teachers’ performance, their own performance, and the level of usage of reliable electronic resources to successfully perform activities that are assigned in each learning unit.

Keywords:

Significant learning, Technology in education.