The relationships between disciplinary training, conceptions about learning and the use of metacognitive strategies in university educational sciences students

Abstract

Behind the actions and strategies that people punt into practice to learn or teach there is usually a theoretical body that is scarcely explicit and that is built up starting form a set of coherent or incoherent assumptions according to the relationship that exists between what the subject says and what he/she ac-tually does. This implied representations emerge not only from the formal education that people receive, but also from every subject’s own educational trajectory and, in the case of teacher, they guide in some way their practice, as it has been shown in many researches about this matter. In this article the author analyzes the ideas about learning and the use of metacognitive strategies by two teams of university students enrolled in an educational sciences degree who come from different disciplinary areas of the human and social sciences. The results show that the conceptions about learning depend strongly on the disciplinary field in which students have been trained, although for what regards the use of metacogniti-ve strategies this disciplinary dependence is only partial.