A STUDY OF FUTURE TEACHERS' THINKING CONCEPTIONS

The 21st century society demands competent people in new factors, such as having an adequate capacity to manage the great amount of information to which we are exposed and to think more critically about it. Favoring thinking strategies in our learners is important to prepare them for the demands of the knowledge society. Developing metacognitive awareness is an important part of helping learners become more effective and, importantly, more autonomous in their learning. We need metacognitive teachers to achieve metacognitive learners, so when teachers are aware of the cognitive processes that mobilize to think they are in a better position to achieve their students goes beyond the simple repetition or superficial thinking. A first step in this process is to analyze the conceptions that teachers have about what is thinking strategies. The aim of this study is to analyze the conceptions that future teachers have about thinking. The sample was composed of 235 students of the Degrees of Education of the University of Valladolid. They were asked to elaborate a conceptual map to answer the following questions: What is thinking for you? What kind of things could really be going on in your head when you say you're thinking? When analyzing the results it was found that their answers did not refer, in most cases, to strategic answers, but to associative and goal answers. These results call attention to the need to promote strategies of visible thinking through active methodologies that allow them to construct, and therefore transmit, more meaningful learning to their future students.