Drawing as an Opportunity to Assess Meaningful Learning in College Students

Introduction

Quality formal educational processes are characterized by trying to promote deep, useful, and meaningful learning in students. According to Ausubel (1963), meaningful learning consists essentially in the non-arbitrary interaction between new knowledge and relevant prior knowledge (subsumption) in a continuous process of enrichment and complexification that allows the construction of new meanings. Meaningful learning occurs when the new knowledge is related in a non-arbitrary way with previous knowledge, transforming the learner’s cognitive structure. From this perspective, knowledge cannot be seen as a set of isolated ideas but as an organized, hierarchical, and highly interrelated conceptual network.

For Huang and Chiu (2015), the above-referenced type of learning allows transforming what has been learned into actual knowledge, going beyond the fragmented and memorized assimilation of new information; hence, it is vital in quality education. Considering the above, and based on Ausubel’s (1963) original proposal, different models have been developed to encourage the prompting of meaningful learning. These proposals include Gowin’s (1981) interactionist-social model focused on the negotiation of meanings; Vergnaud’s (1990) theory of conceptual fields, in which meaningful learning is conceived as a progressive construction of conceptual structures, advancing in levels of complexity as time goes by; or Maturana’s (2001), who proposed to see new knowledge as disturbances to previous knowledge, which mobilize meaningful learning. In spite of the differences in their approaches, all of them coincide in stating that meaningful learning is the basis on which other desirable goals in education are built, such as the transfer and application of what has been learned. In this sense, meaningful learning is interconnected with the current concept of competencies since it does not seem possible for learners to develop the ability to “know how to do” in context and “know why” they do what they do without prior meaningful learning.

Unfortunately, promoting teaching experiences and assessing meaningful learning are not easy tasks, even less so in contexts such as the current mass education and liquid societies, characterized by inattention and the culture of the “fast.” Salazar-Ascensio (2018) and Flores-Espejo (2018) agree that the assessment of meaningful learning is a challenge for teachers and, at the same time, a commitment. A challenge to the extent that teachers must find new evaluation mechanisms and scenarios not only to assess but also to guide the (formative) progress, developments, and obstacles that may arise in the complex process of achieving meaningful learning. Thus, commitment, to the extent that the pedagogical reflection associated with evaluation should lead them to improve their teaching practice to ameliorate meaningful learning.

From this perspective, both formatively and summatively evaluating meaningful learning is related to the knowledge learned and its application and the awareness of such knowledge, its integration with other knowledge, the transformation of ideas or ways of thinking, and learning to learn (Crawford, 2012). For this reason, the evaluation methods commonly used in the educational field can rarely capture the complexity involved in meaningful learning.

Although many teachers continue to teach and evaluate meaningful learning, with techniques such as concept maps, V Heuristics, or cognitive maps, many others have abandoned them because of the disinterest such instruments tend to cause their students. Hence, it is not surprising that this is so since such proposals are inherited from the era in which they were created and are, therefore, currently perceived as rigid, excessively cognitive, and overloaded with rules that must be followed for their elaboration. Meaningful learning is indeed a type of “slow-cooked food,” which is to be digested calmly and requires effort and cognitive commitment; therefore, it is necessary to look for new ways to promote and evaluate this type of learning, with proposals more in line with the zeitgeist of these times.