Regarding elementary school, I can remember how I learnt additions and subtractions with remainders. This was part of the foundations required by the official syllabus for 3rd grade in Spain (in 1989, when I was 8 years old). At that time, in an effort to break away with the educational paradigm inherited from the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the Spanish educational authorities turned to constructivism and promulgated the LOGSE law in 1990.

The reduced size of my class (18 pupils) resulted in it being selected to implement the educational reforms before the law was actually passed. In that context, the priority shifted completely from the acquisition of knowledge by rote learning to the cultivation of what were labelled "transversal skills", i.e. to develop the ability of each pupil to build his/her own knowledge by looking for information from primary sources, formulating hypotheses and contrasting them against available facts.

At that level, we learnt the concept of carrying by manipulating an abacus with different colors for units, tens and hundreds. Manipulating the abacus required little skill, but provided a useful analog representation of natural numbers, which allowed pupils to relate abstract calculations with sensory experiences (moving beads, perceiving colours).

By the time I started high school, the constructivist approach was out of fashion on higher levels of education. There was a much more clear divide among subjects, with a different teacher for each one and a stronger emphasis on content over skill development. I remember learning Latin, which was a compulsory subject of the Humanities track I pursued (14 years old). Both the setting and the teaching model were much more traditional, with the teacher delivering daily lectures on different aspects of Latin grammar and syntax. Latin being considered a defunct language for daily purposes, it was taught using the grammar-translation method. From that point of view, the learning approach was closer to cognitivism, with the teacher using a number of methods to convey understanding of the different aspects of Latin. Summative evaluation focused on the ability of learners to understand and translate a finite number of classic Latin texts.

In my current job, I have had to learn how to use many different online platforms related to my duties, which include event management and online content publishing. This kind of skill-based learning has taken place for the most part in an unstructured way and in informal settings, by sharing tips among colleagues during daily breaks and looking for reference materials in the Internet. This learning was needed in order to be able to improve specific business processes. By the very nature of software applications, there is usually one single list of steps that need to be followed in order to achieve a specific result. In this sense, the learning approach to this kind of topics is rooted in behaviorism, since there is usually one single correct answer to each evaluation exercise, and positive reinforcement (added points for correct answers) is more easily applied.