Memorization versus critical thinking
It is known that to carry out the teaching-learning process effectively, it is necessary to make the latter significant for students, being the work of the teacher, achieve said task.
For Ausubel, "meaningful learning is human mechanism, par excellence, to acquire and store the immense amount of ideas and information represented in any field of knowledge". What can be interpreted as the ability of people to learn and have knowledge in any discipline, in this case, mathematics.
In the beginning, the teaching was focused on the transfer of knowledge, where teachers had the mission of transmitting the content systematically and cumulative to the students, who had the role of receptors, being the teacher the only one with an active roleIn the teaching-learning process. The memoristic, was the key to learning. It was necessary to repeat again and again the information delivered in order to be able to retain it in memory, which did not generate more effort. But over time, society realized that the simple fact of memorizing, was not enough to learn, since many of the memorized things served at the time they used and over time they began to forget or had gaps inwhat was remembered, having incomplete and therefore practically unusable information.
Due to the aforementioned, it is that over time new teaching models appeared, where analyzing and understanding information was much more effective for students, since they were more involved with their learning, the teacher was no longer the onlyReceiver, the roles could be invested, students could intervene, have ideas, suggest things and ask others, managing to develop critical thinking.
For Saiz and Nieto, critical thinking is defined as something "of a higher order and as such, it is not automatic, but requires self-determination, reflection, effort, self-control and meta-cognition". What is evidently a much more elaborate process than to memorize and repeat.
Even so, at present, memorization remains a problem for education, since being a learning method that requires less effort, causes learning difficulties, where according to arbones learning difficulties refer to those difficulties that"They manifest in the acquisition and use of reading capabilities, understanding, written expression and mathematical reasoning, during the school stage". Capacities that are precisely not developed with the use of the memorial method.
In the results of the PISA test of 2015, the worst results of the Chilean education system were in mathematics. The measurement showed an average of 423 points in the subject, which according to the indicator, almost half of the students were below level 2, indicating that students do not reach the minimum skills required to completely participate in a modern society, that is, they almost completely lack capacities such as identifying and understanding the function of mathematics in the daily life or in problems that require such knowledge.
Mathematics learning involves, together with reading and writing, one of the fundamental learning of basic school education, given the instrumental nature of these contents. Hence the importance of promoting and developing critical thinking in students. The role of education specifically of the school is to end the paradigms and with the mental scheme imposed, so it is totally necessary to consider the student as an integral being, with the capacity for reasoning, which clearly understands their reality, their position frontto a social group and the conditions of the latter for their coexistence, being part of the development and becoming both individual and collective.
From my experience in the practice center, to the students of the 3rd basic year of the Pedro de Oña school, located in Candelaria, San Pedro de la Paz, they are taught that it is important to learn the origin of the procedure that must be taken toCabo to solve a problem, for example, they are presented with a situation in which they are asked to apply a subtraction, then before doing any procedure, the teacher causes students to read the problem, to analyze it, to ask thingssuch as "What did I understand?", "what should I do?"," What do they ask me?”, In order to promote the development of critical thinking. It also teaches them the use and identification of keywords that help them answer these questions more easily. If it is necessary to use any mathematical formula to solve the exercise, the teacher not only gives them to them and tells them howIn order that children do not require the use of memoristics to remember things, but are able to conclude what they need to use through the analysis of the situation and the data delivered, since as the teacher says it is better to understand andUnderstand content, rather than just repeat it and memorize it, since that way, it will be more difficult to forget it.
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