The presidential election of the human body: applying contextual learning to promote connections between the student and the curricular content.

Using real-world situations to engage students in learning specific content is advocated by educational research as an effective strategy. However, motivating students to establish personal and emotional connections with the curricular content is challenging. We presented a didactic strategy named "the presidential election of the human body," created to use the presidential election context to engage students in studying cell function and structure using role-playing and appropriation of scientific concepts. Four groups of students (n = 124) of the science and mathematics teacher training program chose a cell of the human body to impersonate, they studied the biology of their cell, and they ran in a presidential election campaign. They created slogans, videos, and materials for their campaign, and on the day of the election the group of students voted for the best slogan. The didactic strategy was capable of stimulating the appropriation of the characteristics of the cells they represented. The majority (75%) of the elected candidates represented cells that are linked to the nervous system. Musicality and humor were the most frequent styles that appeared in the slogans. Students strongly agreed that they enjoyed the activity and considered it valuable for contextualizing the learning of anatomy and physiology. Thus, the activity is a didactic resource to stimulate the students to embrace the content they are learning in the contextualized momentum of a presidential election.

The Sometimes Context-Specific Habituation: Theoretical Challenges to Associative Accounts.

A substantial corpus of experimental research indicates that in many species, long-term habituation appears to depend on context-stimulus associations. Some authors have recently emphasized that this type of outcome supports Wagner's priming theory, which affirms that responding is diminished when the eliciting stimulus is predicted by the context where the animal encountered that stimulus in the past. Although we agree with both the empirical reality of the phenomenon as well as the principled adequacy of the theory, we think that the available evidence is more provocative than conclusive and that there are a few nontrivial empirical and theoretical issues that need to be worked out by researchers in the future. In this paper, we comment on these issues within the framework of a quantitative version of priming theory, the SOP model.

The palaeontological exhibition: a venue for dialogue.

Understanding the dialogue between museums and their visitors enables museums to subsist, undergo transformations and become consolidated as socially valued cultural venues. The Museo de La Plata (Argentina) was created in the late nineteenth century as a natural history museum, and this study shows that currently the museum is valued socially as a venue for family leisure and education, at which people make sense to the objects exhibited through characteristics conferred upon them by both the institution and the visitor. Nevertheless, such dialogue is somehow affected by the museographic proposal and the public interpretation of the institutional narrative, which could be analysed within the frame of contextual learning. As a consequence, the evolutionary idea that the museum aims to communicate is distorted by the public. This article highlights the importance of considering the visitors' interpretations when planning museum exhibitions, a perspective that has been rather absent in the Argentinian museums.

El problema de salud y su expresión docente como herramienta didáctica integradora para un diseño curricular / Health problem and its teaching translation as an integrating didactic tool for curriculum design in the Medical School

El presente trabajo organizó información que sustenta cómo el aprender solucionando problemas constituye una estrategia educacional de elección cuando se persiguen la integración y contextualización curriculares, para formar un médico que deberá ser un comunicador, capaz de trabajar en equipos y de educar al individuo y a la comunidad a vivir con sanidad, al tiempo que detectar y manejar con capacidad y profesionalidad las agresiones a la salud. Los escenarios de la Atención Primaria de Salud donde se forma el médico cubano, pueden permitir el diseño y creación de un modelo de aprendizaje aún más revolucionario, porque la identificación de los problemas de salud prevalentes se torna esencial recurso curricular a nivel del macro currículo, y esta precisión, permite su transformación didáctica en problemas docentes en función de lograr las competencias y desempeño profesional, de este modo el aprender solucionando problemas ocurre en y para la Atención Primaria de Salud

The present paper organized information that supports problem based learning as an educational strategy of choice whenever integration and curricular contextualization are required to develop a doctor that should be a communicator, able to work in teams and educate the individual and the community to live a healthy life as well as highlight and manage with capacity and professionalism those aggressiveness to health. The Primary Health Care teaching scenarios where Cuban doctors are formed, enable the design and creation of a more revolutionary learning model where the identification of the prevailing health problems may become an essential curriculum tool, whose didactic transformation to teaching problems may enable to achieve competences and professional performance;in this way, problem based learning occurs within and for Primary Health Care