It is called learning to the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, values and attitudes, made possible by studying, teaching or experience. This process can be understood from different positions, which implies that there are different theories linked to learning. Behavioral psychology, for example, describes learning according to the changes that can be observed in the behavior of a subject.
The fundamental process in learning is imitation (the repetition of an observed process, involving time, space, skills, and other resources). In this way, children learn the basic tasks necessary to subsist and develop in a community.
Human learning is defined as the relatively unchanging change in a person’s behavior from the result of experience. This change is achieved after establishing an association between a stimulus and its corresponding response. Capacity is not exclusive to the human species, although in humans learning was established as a factor that surpasses the common ability of the most similar branches of evolution. Thanks to the development of learning, humans have managed to achieve a certain independence from their ecological environment and can even change it according to their needs.
The pedagogy establishes different types of learning. It can be mentioned learning by discovery (the contents are not received passively, but are rearranged to adapt them to the cognition scheme), receptive learning (the individual understands the content and reproduces it, but fails to discover something new), the meaningful learning (when the subject links his previous knowledge with new knowledge and gives it coherence according to his cognitive structure) and repetitive learning (produced when data is memorized without understanding it or linking it with previous knowledge).
Theories of learning
As defined by Isabel García, learning is all that knowledge that is acquired from the things that happen to us in daily life, in this way knowledge, skills, etc. are acquired. This is accomplished through three different methods, experience, instruction, and observation.
According to Patricia Duce, one of the things that greatly influences learning is the interaction with the environment, with other individuals, these elements modify our experience, and therefore our way of analyzing and appropriating information. Through learning, an individual can adapt to the environment and respond to the changes and actions taking place around them, changing if necessary to survive.
There are many theories around why and how human beings access knowledge, such as that of Pávlov, who affirms that knowledge is acquired through reaction to simultaneous stimuli; or Albert Bandura’s theory in which each individual is said to put together her own way of learning according to the primitive conditions she has had to imitate models. For his part, Piaget approaches it exclusively analyzing cognitive development.
In theories of learning, an attempt is made to explain the way in which meanings are structured and new concepts are learned. A concept serves to reduce learning to a point in order to decomplexize it and be able to grasp it; they serve not only to identify people or objects, but also to order them and classify reality, so that we can predict what will happen. At this point, we can affirm that there are two ways to form the concepts: the empiricist (it is carried out through a process of association, where the subject is passive and receives the information through the senses) and the European (it is achieved by reconstruction, the subject is active and is responsible for building learning with the tools available to him)
To conclude we will say that learning consists of one of the basic functions of the human, animal and artificial systems mind and is the acquisition of knowledge from certain external information.
It should be noted that at the time when all human beings are born, except those born with disabilities, we have the same intellect and that according to how the learning process develops, said intellectual capacity will be used to a greater or lesser extent..
Learning is acquiring, analyzing and understanding information from the outside and applying it to one’s existence. As individuals learn we must forget the preconceptions and acquire a new behavior. Learning forces us to change behavior and reflect new knowledge in present and future experiences. Three essential acts are necessary to learn: observing, studying and practicing.
