“Educational reforms carried out in Spain in the last three decades have been necessary, but inadequate”, points out UGR Professor José Luis Arco-Tirado, of the Department of Evolutionary and Education Psychology In his article “Contextual Barriers for the Educational Reform”, prepared together with Professor Juan Miguel Fernández-Balboa, proposes a reform of the educational system with a greater implication of parents in the education process and a greater presence of new technologies applied to research work.
According to the authors, “reforms are based on factors which vary according to the education level. For example, the reform of the LOGSE (Spanish law which provided a new educational system) met essential needs of our system, like rising the school-leaving age to 16. In other cases, factors connected with progress and social development caused these reforms, like new information and communication technologies and the needs of the production sector.”
A necessary change in the way of teaching
In this sense, “the daily use of technology requires an essential change in the way of teaching, training and learning”. If this were not the case, we run the risk of giving way to the so-called “digital breach” or functional illiteracy. Arco-Tirado and Fernández-Balboa remind the limited implementation of the Internet in Andalusian homes or the ratio of 12-15 students per computer in educational institutions. This change will help to “reduce the difference among autonomous regions. An Andalusian student has 67% less chance of accessing compulsory secondary education than a student born in the Basque Country“.
The conclusions of this paper published in the Internacional Review of Education offer data which help to evaluate and understand better the current situation of the different levels of the education system. Thus, one could emphasize that “after six years of reforms, 63.1% of the members of the centres have not taken into account the necessary criteria and methods to do assessment. 21.5% of them have not an internal committee and 50% of those who have done it says that it had little impact in reform processes.
Professors Arco-Tirado and Fernández-Balboa suggest an improvement of teacher´s training and teaching materials and strategies. In addition, they suggest that there should be collaboration with those teachers who incorporate more efficient teaching practices and the setting up of a mechanism for parents to get involved in the learning process.
Reference: Prof. José Luis Arco-Tirado.
Dpt. of Evolutionary and Education Psychology.
Phone number: 958 249659.
E-mail: jlarco@ugr.es
