The Future of Education

This paper presents an impact evaluation of an instructional intervention oriented to foster learning strategies regarding idea selection and organization on a first year engineering students. Learning strategies are mental processes that students may perform to facilitate the achievement of a learning task. Idea selection and organization is a kind of strategy classified as a cognitive one, since it allows to process the information read by a student. The implemented didactic sequence consisted of introducing through instruction how to elaborate academic summaries and subsequently students write a summary about technical engineering texts. Participants on this research were electrical and electronics engineering freshmen from a Colombian university enrolled in an introduction to engineering class who developed the proposed intervention. Additionally, a first year mechatronics engineering group was evaluated in order to compare its performance in terms of this learning strategy. The MSLQ-Colombia questionnaire was the psychometric instrument used to measure whether instruction and practice writing summaries allowed to students fostering idea selection and organization. From the evaluation of the gathered data the authors concluded that participants in the educational intervention promoted significantly (statistical significance) the use of cognitive strategies.  In addition, contrast between groups also showed that the instructional strategy was effective to develop the intended strategy.