Categorias conceptuales para el estudio del conocimiento estratégico empleado al interactuar con simulaciones educativas

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce some relationships between elements coming from psychological referentials with the purpose of developing a referential framework for interpreting and understanding the actions that take place during school practices with computer simulations that include, in addition to concepts of the learning process of a particular discipline, concepts that refer to social relationships, not only interactions among people but also between people with to culture, social institutions and social structure. From a social constructivist approach is proposed to constitute the object of study in the system “person + tool” in the situated context in the learning of science in the school, in order to obtain categories that allow us investigate the strategic knowledge employed by the students when they use educational simulations and the influence of the latter in science learning. We believe that the study of the strategic knowledge performed by the students in science classes when they interact with computer simulations is an issue of the technological mediation of learning. For that reason, from the socio-historical perspective we have selected the following categories: instrumental mediation, the distributed character of cognition, the zone of proximal development and the situated character of cognition.