"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education" (Einstein).
"The learner will be the conductor of his own learning" (Sugata Mitra).
"What I hear, I forget; what I see, I remember; what I do, I learn" (Confucius).
Discovery Learning
Discovery learning (also called "heuristic learning") is a learning methodology in which the learner discovers the concepts and their relationships in a given problem and adapts and integrates them into his or her cognitive system.
The teacher makes the presentation of a problem to the student, and may additionally give some small hints or clues.
The student must try to find the criteria or heuristics for solving the problem. He/she should investigate, make observations, explore alternatives, establish similarities and differences with other problems, etc. In this way, the student progressively builds new knowledge from his previous concepts and ideas when facing a learning situation. This new knowledge is constructed by establishing links between the cognitive structure and the new information. The new knowledge acquired by the learner can be applied to new situations, in a continuous evolutionary learning process.
Learning can be inductive (bottom-up, arriving at a new concept or category by generalization), deductive (top-down, arriving at something new by combining already known concepts or ideas) or transductive (horizontal, by resemblance to other problems).
A typical situation is that of a student trying to figure out how a certain system works, without prior instruction from anyone.
Discovery learning is part of cognitive psychology. The psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner, in the 1960's, was the creator of "guided" discovery learning. The teacher must give certain indications about the problem and stimulate the students to discover the solution. The material provided by the teacher constitutes what Bruner calls "scaffolding".
The characteristics of discovery learning are as follows:
It is active, rather than passive, receptive learning.
It considers the process of learning to be as important or more important than the contents to be learned.
Learning is meaningful, that is, the learner acquires substantial or essential information intuitively. It grasps the meaning, scope, or structure of a problem or situation without the intervention of formal methods of analysis and testing.
It replaces or complements the traditional system.
It is especially useful for learning foreign languages. The learner takes an active role, deduces how to elaborate sentences and learns from mistakes. One system of discovery learning is the Silent Way.
It is also very useful in computing, as usually equipment does not come with an instruction manual and it is up to the user to discover how it works, as its operation is supposed to be intuitive.
The advantages are:
It is creative rather than mechanical learning.
It stimulates the learner's intelligence and intuitive thinking.
Enhances metacognitive structures: learning to learn.
Stimulates the self-esteem and security of the student.
What is learned is better remembered or not forgotten than what is received passively.
Sugata Mitra's experiment
Sugata Mitra is an educational researcher who conducted an experiment called "Hole in the Wall" in 1999. He placed a computer (connected to the Internet) built into a wall in a slum in New Delhi, to which the children of the slum had free access. The experiment showed that the children managed to discover, without any instruction, how the computer worked and how to access the Internet by teaching each other.
Mitra called his system "minimally invasive education" and "self-organized learning." Since then, the experiment has been repeated in many places with similar results.
MENTAL and Discovery Learning
MENTAL is a language discovered by the author, and disclosed through this work. The discovery was motivated by the conviction that there must necessarily be a primary or universal language of a philosophical and psychological type that would underlie the formal sciences, reality and possible worlds. Being a universal language, it had to be necessarily simple. But, paradoxically, the process of discovery has not been easy, because discovering the simple is the most complex thing there is. This is what is called "the paradox of simplicity", which we have already discussed in [Fundamentals − Principle of Economics].
In the same way that the author of this work has discovered it, other researchers could arrive at the same or similar results. It would be a matter of providing them with the "scaffolding" of looking for the fundamental concepts or categories, of the maximum possible generality, and their combinations to create new concepts. The objective of the "game" is to create a formal language by means of a certain syntax, although this last aspect is secondary. The important thing is semantics. It would be to investigate how reality and possible worlds work, in the same way as the "hole in the wall". It would be to discover the "instructions" of the computer that governs everything.
Once this primary language has been discovered, the most essential thing is learned, which is the foundation for all other learning, since it provides a solid base that allows all knowledge to be interconnected.
MENTAL is an important scientific, philosophical and psychological discovery. From this fundamental discovery would come all the others, which would be secondary.
Bibliography
Ausubel, David P. Learning by Discovery. Internet, 1962.
Barrón Ruiz, Angela. Aprendizaje por descubrimiento: Análisis crítico y reconstrucción teórica. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1991.
Guerrero Sánchez, María de Rus. Metodologías activas y aprendizaje por descubrimiento. Las TIC y la Educación. Kindle, 2014.
Hernández, G. Paradigmas en psicología de la educación. Paidós, 1998.
Mitra, Sugata. The Hole in the Wall: Self-Organising Systems in Education.
Mitra, Sugata. Beyond the Hole in the Wall: Discover the Power of Self-Organized Learning. TED Books, Kindle Edition, 2012.
Mitra, Sugata. The Future of Learning. Universidad Francisco Marroquín, Kindle Edition, 2016.
Novak, J. D. Aprendizaje y conocimiento. Alianza, 1998.
