Estudio comparativo del nivel de habilidad de abstracción en estudiantes de pregrado y postgrado, para el desarrollo de estrategias de pensamiento de alto nivel cognitivo

Higher thinking skills are one of the premises that higher education organizations are developing through various cognitive strategies, in both undergraduate and postgraduate areas. The main objective of this research is to compare the level of abstraction skill in both level students, to establish thinking strategies of a high cognitive level. A quantitative methodology was used, complemented by descriptive one, statistical design and a classification analysis of 5 experiments programmed in R language, applied to a sample of two teacher training courses in Grandad University, Spain, where a strategy test was implemented (N = 81). The results highlight the good levels of abstraction of the students with an optimal level of 30.9%, a good level of 23.5%, a satisfactory level of 37.0% and an unsatisfactory level of 8.6%. The female gender had better performance with 13.3 points over the male gender. In the case of the Pegagogy Program (undergraduate students), they obtained a better level of abstraction than those of the Master (Postgraduate Program). It is concluded that the strategies used to develop high cognitive levels must be diverse and with a formative intention, and with an explicit teaching of skills and the reason for their use in these teacher training programs. Finally, teachers must be aware that lower cognitive skills are required to achieve higher ones, because abstraction requires previous skills such as analyzing and synthesizing to be able to achieve it.