Learning Strategies at a Higher Taxonomic Level in Primary Education Students in the Digital Age

Abstract

The education system must respond to the demands and needs of today’s society. To meet this demand, teachers must identify the degree of cognitive skills that our students possess through digital learning strategies that encourage the development of these superior skills because of the impact of technological resources on student motivation. To carry out this assessment, two types of strategy tests were applied to evaluate cognitive skills, one determining the student’s ability to create an opinion of their own based on ideas and visions of other authors (perspective analysis) and the other strategy test to distinguish the main elements of an information, identifying a general pattern (abstraction), which were reviewed with a task performance instrument (rubrics). A mixed methodology was used through a case study, with a selected and intentional sample of 34 students of the Primary Education Grade. The results show that elaborating questions that go deeper into a topic and labelling contents is not an easy task and that abstraction is one of the most complex skills to develop in students. It should be noted that, in practically all areas, men’s averages exceed those of women. Finally, the use of digital strategies must be incorporated as permanent routines and the relationship between technology and pedagogy allows for the management of learning and therefore increases higher level cognitive abilities.