El Deporte como una categoría de la Actividad Física

Learning is a process of change that occurs when individuals acquire knowledge about the world. By understanding the process involved in absorbing information and the factors that influence learning, theorists have described learning from two different perspectives: objectivist and constructivist. Historically, the teaching and learning of anatomy draws upon a range of these theories.

Both behaviourists and cognitivists are regarded as objectivists; that is, they view knowledge as objective—as existing outside the mind of an individual.

Behaviourists

Behaviourists such as Skinner, Pavlov, Watson and Thorndike view learning as a process that is determined by the external environment rather than the learner, which

results in an observable and quantifiable change in behaviour (Merriam & Caffarella, 1991). They view the world as fundamental to transmitting knowledge to the learner in the absence of any contextualisation or interpretation, and repetition and reinforcement are the key components of the behaviourist approach to learning (Hartley, 1998). The traditional form of teaching anatomy, which centred around numerous hours of lectures, could be regarded as operating under the behaviourist approach, wherein the teacher is the active provider of information, or the “sage on the stage” (Collins, 2009, p. 19), and the learner is the passive recipient. This didactic approach to teaching results in students adopting memorisation techniques and learning by rote (Collins, 2009) to assimilate information presented by the teacher, and there is evidence to suggest that such

approaches to learning make it more difficult to retain knowledge (Vasan et al., 2008).

Cognitivists

Cognitivists such as Lewin and Gagne focus on the learner’s internal (mental) processes (e.g., information processing, storage and retrieval) that are involved in the act of learning (Ertmer & Newby, 2013; Merriam & Caffarella, 1991). According to the cognitive approach, conditions for learning must be optimal in that instruction must be clearly structured, well organised, easy to understand and contain feedback so that learners can begin to appreciate the importance of prior knowledge to the learning process (Hartley, 1998).

The cognitive model has the student as the learner at its centre. It emphasises developing or constructing tools that allow the student to learn and apply that

knowledge in a variety of settings—a process that involves deep learning (Collins, 2009). For this to occur, new knowledge and concepts must be presented considering what is already known, as this has been shown to facilitate learning (Norman, 2009). Theoretically, it can be argued that dissection follows the cognitive model of learning

because students apply knowledge from lectures to the dissection table, where they actively engage in the process of dissecting (Older, 2004; McLachlan & Patten, 2006). However, given that anatomy is a fact-based discipline, students must remember to apply a vast amount of information in the practical setting. For example, for every structure, students need to know its anatomical name, its origin and course through the body, and where it can be damaged during dissection. In the traditional curriculum, anatomists were criticised for their role in providing such detail because it not only overwhelmed students and subsequently affected their learning, but it was also considered irrelevant to clinical practice (Orbson et al., 2014).

Therefore, it is not enough to create activities that one hopes will allow students to make inferences. It is equally important to understand how students acquire and retain knowledge, and how the transfer of knowledge from short-term to long-term memory occurs (Magid et al., 2009) because it is important to manage students’ cognitive load to maximise learning.

Cognitive load is defined as “the amount of mental activity that a particular task imposes on a working memory” (Moscova et al., 2015, p. 216). For students to learn, information must be processed first within their working memory (i.e., short-term memory) before it can be transferred into long-term memory (which has an unlimited capacity to store information). Since working memory has limited capacity, the transfer of knowledge becomes difficult if the cognitive load is too high. Total cognitive load is based on a combination of intrinsic load (the inherent level of difficulty of the content to be learned) and extraneous load (the way in which instructional material is conveyed to students). If students are presented with too much extraneous load through large

amounts of information at any given time, they are more likely to experience cognitive overload—particularly if their intrinsic load is already high (Kirsh, 2000). This is most

likely to occur in a condensed and integrated curriculum where time is constrained but the volume of information to be covered increases. Consequently, students become unable to process the information, let alone store it in their long-term memory, and this is viewed as detrimental to their learning (Moscova et al., 2015; Mousavi, Low, & Sweller, 1995). To combat the overload of content, students adopt surface approaches to learning (Pandey & Zimitat, 2007). Therefore, to maximise students’ learning and cognitive capacity, content must be delivered in a simple way. For example, the use of images accompanied by an audio explanation has been found to be more beneficial in learning than the use of both audio and text in addition to an image (Kalyuga, Chandler, & Sweller, 1999). This finding can be further extrapolated to combine other approaches to provide information to students and help them with the transfer of knowledge from short-term to long-term memory.

Constructivists

Constructivists are contemporary cognitive theorists who question the

philosophical nature of objectivity and ascertain that although an external reality exists, individuals construct reality differently depending on their beliefs and interpretations of their experiences with the external world (Jonassen, 1991). Piaget, Bruner and Dewey are among the theorists who represent the constructivist perspective in which learners are considered central to the learning process because they use their existing knowledge and personal experiences to construct and adapt to new knowledge (Ertmer & Newby, 2013; Phillips, 1995). Therefore, with the paradigm shift along the behaviourist, cognitivist and constructivist continuum, the focus of instruction moves from passive learning, where the teacher is the ‘sage on the stage’, to active learning, where the student is a key participant in problem-solving and reasoning to develop and extend knowledge structures.

Thus, learning involves a combination of processes that are both external and internal to the learner. External processes involve memorisation, extensive knowledge of a topic and acquiring facts and skills that can be used when required. Internal processes involve abstract reasoning, making sense of the world from the information acquired and comprehending the world by interpreting and reinterpreting knowledge (Ramsden, 2003). The discipline of anatomy involves a certain level of memorisation and comprehension to apply factual knowledge to a variety of clinical settings. Thus, learning cannot be simplified into an ‘either–or’ approach. Possessing knowledge of a particular task does not necessarily translate into being able to perform that task (Lazarus, Chinchilli, Leong, & Kauffman, 2012).

While it appears that the constructivist approach to learning dominates modern education, Alexander, Schallert and Reynolds (2009) remind us that there is no grand theory of learning. Further, the philosophical assumptions of learning that highlight the developmental processes of cognition and behaviour cannot be fully applied to the processes used in adult learning. Therefore, a new set of principles and theories have been developed to generate a better understanding of how adults learn—particularly in the workforce.