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Este libro trata de resumir las ideas fundamentales que, según Richard E. Mayer, todo docente debería conocer para respaldar sus decisiones educativas con base en las evidencias científicas disponibles. De forma muy oportuna, Richard E. Mayer organiza el libro alrededor de los tres grandes temas en que puede dividirse el objeto de estudio de la psicología educativa: el aprendizaje, la enseñanza y la evaluación.

El libro está dirigido a las personas que buscan un enfoque científico en su objetivo de ayudar a aprender. La premisa subyacente es que, si deseamos ayudar a las personas a aprender, nos resultará de utilidad tener algún conocimiento sobre cómo se produce el aprendizaje. Pero la ciencia del aprendizaje estaría huérfana sin la ciencia de la enseñanza y la ciencia de la evaluación. Por eso, el libro hace un repaso a los principales hallazgos con que la investigación educativa en su conjunto puede contribuir a la mejora de la educación.

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Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.

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It is difficult to overstate the value of practice. For a new skill to become automatic or for new knowledge to become long-lasting, sustained practice, beyond the point of mastery, is necessary. This column summarizes why practice is so important and reviews the different effects of intense short-term practice versus sustained, long-term practice.

Artículo en inglés
Artículo en español

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of researchers from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology who seek to understand the mind. In this regular American Educator column, we consider findings from this field that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.

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Very often, students will think they understand a body of material. Believing that they know it, they stop trying to learn more. But, come test time, it turns out they really don't know the material. Can cognitive science tell us anything about why students are commonly mistaken about what they know and don't know? Are there any strategies teachers can use to help students better estimate what they know?

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment (CEFR) is part of the Council of Europe’s continuing work to ensure quality inclusive education as a right of all citizens. This update to the CEFR, first published online in 2018 in English and French as the “CEFR Companion Volume with New Descriptors”, updates and extends the CEFR, which was published as a book in 2001 and which is available in 40 languages at the time of writing. With this new, user-friendly version, the Council of Europe responds to the many comments that the 2001 edition was a very complex document that many language professionals found difficult to access. The key aspects of the CEFR vision are therefore explained in Chapter 2, which elaborates the key notions of the CEFR as a vehicle for promoting quality in second/foreign language teaching and learning as well as in plurilingual and intercultural education. The updated and extended version of the CEFR illustrative descriptors contained in this publication replaces the 2001 version of them. 

This publication is the product of a project of the Education Policy Division of the Council of Europe. The focus in that project was to update the CEFR’s illustrative descriptors by:

• highlighting certain innovative areas of the CEFR for which no descriptor scales had been provided in the set of descriptors published in 2001, but which have become increasingly relevant over the past 20 years, especially mediation and plurilingual/pluricultural competence;
• building on the successful implementation and further development of the CEFR, for example by more fully defining “plus levels” and a new “Pre-A1” level;
• responding to demands for more elaborate descriptions of listening and reading in existing scales, and for descriptors for other communicative activities such as online interaction, using telecommunications, and expressing reactions to creative texts (including literature);
• enriching description at A1, and at the C levels, particularly C2;
• adapting the descriptors to make them gender-neutral and “modality-inclusive” (and so applicable also to sign languages), sometimes by changing verbs and sometimes by offering the alternatives “speaker/signer”.

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Para ordenar un poco el asunto, organizaré la exposición en «fases». En la primera de ellas intentaré un estado crítico de la cuestión revisando algunos de los mitos que, desde mi punto de vista, persisten en la enseñanza del subjuntivo. El resto constituye un simple ordenamiento del protocolo que propongo para entender y administrar didácticamente el fenómeno de la selección modal: una fase lógica para empezar a entender qué significa el subjuntivo en términos de comunicación, una fase legislativa para proporcionar la base de un protocolo de decisión, una fase cartográfica para dibujar el mapa por donde habremos de movernos en el proceso de aprendizaje y, por último, una fase lúdica que, en contra de lo que sugiere su nombre, plantea el espinoso problema de manejar las aparentes desviaciones que se observan en el uso nativo del modo sin que ello resulte en una inmanejable lista de excepciones.

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At the turn of the new millennium, in an article published in Language Teaching Research in 2000, Dörnyei and Kormos proposed that ‘active learner engagement is a key concern’ for all instructed language learning. Since then, language engagement research has increased exponentially. In this article, we present a systematic review of 20 years of language engagement research. To ensure robust coverage, we searched 21 major journals on second language acquisition (SLA) and applied linguistics and identified 112 reports satisfying our inclusion criteria. The results of our analysis of these reports highlighted the adoption of heterogeneous methods and conceptual frameworks in the language engagement literature, as well as indicating a need to refine the definitions and operationalizations of engagement in both quantitative and qualitative research. Based on these findings, we attempted to clarify some lingering ambiguity around fundamental definitions, and to more clearly delineate the scope and target of language engagement research. We also discuss future avenues to further advance understanding of the nature, mechanisms, and outcomes resulting from engagement in language learning.

Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appear to need near-native proficiency to behave like native speakers. The question addressed here is whether sensitivity to grammatical gender in L2 learners of Spanish is modulated by the cognate status of nouns due to their heightened parallel orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic activation. Additionally, the role of transparent and non-transparent word-final gender marking cues was examined because past studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish are sensitive to differences in gender transparency. Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data were collected using the visual world paradigm. Participants saw 2-picture visual scenes in which objects either matched in gender (same-gender trials) or mismatched (different-gender trials). Targets were embedded in the preamble Encuentra el/la ___ ‘Find the ___’. The monolingual group displayed an anticipatory effect on different gender trials, replicating past studies that show that native speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in prenominal modifiers predictively. The learners were able to use gender information on the articles to facilitate processing, but only when the nouns had gender endings that were transparent. Cognate status did not confer an advantage during grammatical gender processing