This article presents the research results in relation to an interdisciplinary teaching innovation project—Teaching and Learning of Social Sciences and Teaching and Learning of Natural Sciences—with Early Childhood Preservice Teachers (ECPT) at the University of Alcalá (Spain) in the pandemic context by COVID-19 during 2020–2021 (N = 55): 52 women (94.55%) and 3 men (5.45%) from 20 to 22 years of age. The main research problem is to know if the ECPT improves the learning to learn competence after a challenge-based learning (CBL) linked to virtual tour in a museum. The main objective was to improve the learning to learn competence, during a virtual tour at the Community of Madrid Regional Archaeological Museum (MAR) (Alcalá de Henares, Spain) for a reflective training of students to understand problems of the past and present and future global challenges, promote collaborative and multidisciplinary work, and defend ethics and leadership. In order to ascertain the level of acquisition of this competence in those teachers who were being trained, their self-perception—pretest–posttest—of the experience was assessed through a system of categories adapted from the European Commission. ECPT worked, in small groups and using e/m-learning tools, ten challenges and one storytelling cooperatively with university teachers to solve prehistoric questions related to current situations and problems. Subsequently, two Early Childhood Education teachers from a school in Alcalá de Henares reviewed the proposals and adapted them for application in the classroom of 5-year-old boys and girls. The results show an improvement in this competence in Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: total score pre-post comparison paired-samples Wilcoxon test result shows a statistically significant difference (p> 0.001); an evaluation rubric verified the results of self-perception. Second, we highlight the importance of carrying out virtual museum tours from a challenge-based learning for the development of big ideas, essential questions, challenges, and activities on socioeconomic, environmental, and emotional knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Third, this experience shows the insufficient educational adaptation of the virtual museum tour to the Early Childhood Education stage from a technological and didactic workshops point of view, but there is a diversity of paleontological and archaeological materials and a significant sociocritical discourse.
The aim of this work is to promote outdoor activities to bring students closer to the environment and the biodiversity of their surroundings. In this sense, educational itineraries are a very good educational resource that promotes skills developing (scientific, cartographic, educational, etc.) which are necessary for the appropriate design of teaching proposals. The present study is carried out with the prospective primary teachers from the Universities of Sevilla and Huelva (Spain). Firstly, the purpose is to analyse what type of educational itineraries they can design after an outdoor activity. Secondly, a rubric is validated as an instrument of analysis and evaluation immersed in a qualitative methodology. The results show what kind of itineraries are designed, and what knowledge and conceptual difficulties the students display. Most of them do not recognize the minimal of elements making up the itineraries, and have difficulties in understanding the environment as a complex system. In summary, we think that the students’ lacking of knowledge about the environment and its biodiversity, the poor geographic-cartographic competencies that they have, together with their maintenance of traditional conceptions of teaching, do not allow them to design proposals of interest for teaching-learning processes.
This study was developed with Early Childhood Preservice Teachers within the framework of the Teaching and Learning of Social Sciences over three academic years (2017–2018, 2018–2019, and 2019–2020) at the University of Alcalá. The main objective was to improve the learning to learn competence during teacher training from an outdoor experience at the Museum of Guadalajara (Spain), using e/m-learning tools (Blackboard Learn, Google Forms, QR codes, and websites) and the inquiry-based learning approach. To ascertain the level of acquisition of this competence in those teachers who were being trained, their self-perception—before and after—of the outdoor experience was assessed through a system of categories adapted from the European Commission. The results show a certain improvement in this competence in Early Childhood Preservice Teachers. Additionally, this outdoor experience shows the insufficient educational adaptation of the museum to the early childhood education stage from a social sciences point of view. Finally, we highlight the importance of carrying out outdoor experiences from an inquiry-based education approach. These outdoor experiences should be carried out in places like museums to encourage contextualized and experiential learning of the youngest in formal education.
Bullying research among preschoolers and the early grades of primary school is still scarce. With the aid of a set of cartoons representing prototypical bullying scenes, we interview 120 schoolchildren (50% girls) from kindergarten to third grade (age range: 5.44–9.58) from three mainstream public schools located in the eastern Community of Madrid, in order to analyse their perceptions regarding this phenomenon. Results show that 94.2% (n = 113) of schoolchildren are able to recognize when a partner is victimized. Nevertheless, significant differences were found by grade (p = 0.017), with kindergarteners giving more responses classified as one-off aggressions. Most students (n = 102) empathize with the victims´ emotions and condemn the bullies’ behavior, regardless of their gender (p = 0.637) or grade (p = 0.578). A total of 53.9% (n = 64) of students think these bullying situations are partly caused by previous conflicts; girls are inclined to think this more often than boys (p = 0.003). Furthermore, 53.8% (n = 64) of the students would request help from their schoolteachers if they were bullied, with no statistically significant differences by gender (p = 0.254) or by grade (p = 0.133). These results serve as a rationale to develop bullying prevention programs from a very early school age to provide information regarding its causation and coping strategies, among others.
28 February 2020 in Profesorado, Revista de Currículum y Formación del Profesorado
En este trabajo presentamos el diseño de una rúbrica por niveles de progresión para evaluar mapas o tramas conceptuales. Nuestro objetivo fue diseñar este instrumento de evaluación a partir de la participación de los estudiantes de los Grados de Maestro de Educación Infantil y Primaria para posteriormente validarlo y reformularlo en función de los resultados obtenidos. Lo remarcable de esta rúbrica no es solo el proceso por el cual se obtiene, ya que surge como resultado del enriquecimiento de los presupuestos de partida de los docentes, sino también la atención especial que se le da a la creatividad en el proceso de construcción progresiva del conocimiento. Metodológicamente partimos de la puesta en común de propuestas diseñadas por los estudiantes y los docentes. Esta propuesta es revisada y mejorada tras su proceso de validación, el cual consistió en usarla para la evaluación de distintos mapas conceptuales. El proceso de validación se realizó con ambos Grados de Maestro y se repitió en distintos momentos durante el curso. La rúbrica, como conclusión, se constituye como un instrumento objetivo y sistemático de usos múltiples para el desarrollo de aprendizajes significativos, globalizadores e interdisciplinares, desde un punto de vista de la construcción progresiva de los conocimientos.