Pedagogical practice for the development of meaningful learning in mathematics.

Abstract

Significant learning is understood as that learning that goes beyond being memoristic to achieve true knowledge that is not forgotten and that is applicable throughout life. If a teacher promotes only the learning of mathematics, he/she will only get students to memorize a compendium of formulas and procedures that will be of no use to them and they will hardly find opportunities to apply them; on the other hand, if he/she generates learning environments for science through didactic actions and pedagogical practices that integrate contents, concepts, procedures and values, he/she will get students to achieve significant learning in mathematics. Objective: To develop pedagogical practices and didactic strategies to address and consolidate concepts and properties that lead to making mathematics learning meaningful. Methodology: The research is of an educational nature and is framed from a multi-method approach in the qualitative paradigm through educational action research method focused on the discovery of problems and solution methods with the purpose of identifying opportunities to improve the pedagogical practice of teachers in search of generating meaningful learning of mathematics in their students and interpretative from analysis of results of the process obtained by participant observation, interviews applied to teachers and opinions collected through focus group in which students from the participating institutions participated and from the quantitative paradigm in the analysis of mathematical thinking assessment test. Conclusions: The experience allowed visualizing the commitment with which students approach the proposed activities and the generation of a classroom environment with implementation of cooperative learning that favors the relationship between teachers and students generating work alternatives in search of achieving significant learning of mathematics. The work through problem-based learning and cooperative learning allowed motivating students in the development of the process of building their own knowledge by working in cooperative teams in which they determine roles according to their abilities and actively participate in the construction of collective knowledge. The study made it possible to determine that the pedagogical practices developed by teachers that involve innovation and creativity in the students, that promote cooperative work and that relate mathematics with other disciplines that are somehow attractive to the students, lead to generate significant learning environments in mathematics.