COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS. LEARNING IN SOCIAL WORK STUDENTS PROLEGOMENA

This article, result of applied social research, of evaluative type, gathers the author's need to systematize and validate the pedagogical experience for competences development in Social Work students during five years. As a result, it invites to share conceptual and pedagogical aspects of in-class work and to reconsider the need to accompany the students' extra-class work to approach the contents, not as ends but as didactics means to deal with competences.. A statistical and qualitative analysis is used to test the proposed work hypothesis as complex learning mediated through an autopoietic didactics. This is to say, specific competences (regarding content) and communicative competences (interpret, argue and propose) are established as impact variables that are achieved by activating cognitive domains (basic functions, executive functions, educational and meta-cognitive functions). In the same way, the role of thinking styles, proposed as perceptual, strategic, analogic and reflexive, and the proximal development zone as intervening variables are shown.