Abstract:

From a structuralist perspective, the human being is not at the center of reality, and the world with all its systems, structures and objects exists independently from the people that inhabit it. A wooden door is a wooden door regardless of the culture and background of the individuals using it. If somebody lights a fire with it, it is simply because they don’t know what its proper use is. From this structuralist perspective of the social sciences, traditional teaching is just a matter of information transmission from teacher to student, and the process of learning consists on memorizing and repeating that information.
From this point of view, the teacher is the key element of the system, for he is the one who offers the student valid information about the real world. The quality of the learning process is measured by the amount of information stored by the student and its similarity with the original one. The teacher has an authoritarian role, “the sage on the stage” as it has been termed sometimes, and decides how to organize and regulate this information transmission.
It is noteworthy that in this view of teaching and learning, evaluation is often carried out by asking the student to remember by rote memory as much information as possible, and to reproduce it with maximum fidelity. No other problem solving task nowadays is performed in this manner, and we often have the aid of books, colleagues, the Internet, software applications, etc. If we want to prepare our students to perform tasks and solve problems in the society of the future, we can’t continue to put the emphasis on memorizing but on searching, selection and application of information. The psychological basis for this traditional teaching can be found in behaviorism, but we should complete this view of learning with the constructivist approach that acknowledges the importance of mental structures and cognitive development in the process of learning.

Keywords:

Learning models, behaviorism, constructivism, cognitive development.