Importance of Discovery Learning

Learning is an experience inherent to the very act of living. That is, over time, a person adds new experiences. However, learning may be the result of a specific type of pedagogy. Discovery learning is that pedagogy that positions the student as the protagonist of their own learning process.

The student becomes an active agent to find the answer to a certain challenge for which he has to find the solution. In this way, the teacher becomes a knowledge mentor, a motivator who offers students the necessary means to find the answers for themselves.

¿Why is it so important?

Because unlike pre-test memorization, discovery is an experience that leaves a special mark in memory, and therefore, students remember more of this type of experience throughout the time.

But also, thanks to this type of initiative, the student trains skills that go beyond memory: a proactive attitude when taking the initiative, self-critical spirit by developing the ability to think for oneself, observing to go beyond what is apparent, collaboration to work as a team...

In this area, the role of passivity that accompanies the student in the traditional experience is broken. when the teacher offers a master class and the students limit themselves to taking notes of the exposure

The creator of discovery learning was the psychologist Jerome Bruner in the 1960s.

through this perspective, the teacher does not offer a class in which he offers closed results to the students, but it is the student himself who gradually reveals a topic. It has the support of the teacher as a facilitator of this learning, a teacher who awakens in the student the passion for self-taught learning.

Advantages that one can observe

1. Encourages a proactive attitude on the part of the student who finds in his motivation internally its main engine to learn every day.

2. This attitude contributes self-esteem to the student who discovers his own resilience to learn, exceeding their own limits.

3. Development of personal autonomy.

4. Ability to get out of the comfort zone since it is at this point where true learning exists. Otherwise, the student remains stuck in what he already knows.

Images: Fotolia. Alexander Vasilyev – Konstantin Yuganov