Desarrollo de habilidades del pensamiento mediante un enfoque afectivo. Un estudio en los colegios salesianos de Cuenca

Abstract

One of the main purposes of education is teaching students how to think critically, which is why certain strategies should be used in order to improve the students’ schooling processes and autonomous learning. One of those strategies is the pedagogy of affectivity, commonly used in the Salesian schools through the preventive system, which has been proven to motivate and ameliorate the students’ learning capacities. Precisely, this investigation, ‘Development of the thinking abilities trough an affective approach. A study of the Salesian schools in Cuenca’, is going to determine whether the affective approach properly stimulates the critical thinking development in the high schools’ students of three schools, two of them Salesian and one with a different pedagogical basis, so that there is a comparison parameter between the groups. The research was made through a quantitative method, with a sample of 120 junior students of the mentioned schools, who sited the test of Thinking abilities by Tapia and Luna. The statistic results, which were obtained using the Shapiro Wilk test for the distribution between schools and the U test of Mann Whitney for the average grades, show that the thinking abilities such as inferential reasoning, classifying, hierarchical structuring and logical reasoning, are Superior and Normal Superior factor in the Salesian schools, whilst the other school remained between the Normal Inferior and Inferior factor.