At the dawn of the 20th century, the OECD launched the Project DeSeCo (for the last executive summary, see OECD (2005)). The aim was to define and select useful and key competences to achieve social cohesion and economic growth. The idea of the Organization was that people may be trained for coping with social and economic changes, so they should response to short-time change positively and solve new social needs. Shortly after, the EU (2006) wrote its own propose on these key competences for the European citizenship. In the whole of the European proposal, eight competences were included and one of them was the ‘learning to learn’ competence. The last review by the European Commission (EU, 2018) gave another name to this competence – ‘personal, social and learning’ – and incorporated new aspects, such as commitment during the learning process and feeling empathy for getting better common learning results.

In parallel to the first proposals about learning of key competences, in Europe the EHEA was set up in 1999 with the Bologna Communiqué. At that time, the higher education systems were taking on the challenge of replacing the traditional instruction paradigm by the Student Centred Learning (SCL) approach (Gargallo López, 2017). As logical, the institutional and teaching concern for how students learn in higher education generates a favourable environment to incorporate the 'learning to learn' competence in bachelors’ programs with certain expectations of success. In view of that, several research teams in Europe has tried to set down the bases of this competence, focusing on university studies.

Background

Actually, Europe's position on higher education is nothing new and SCL is based on a history of research about Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) and Learning Strategies (LS), at least since the 80s and 90s to the present day. Among these studies, it may well be mentioned those of Bandura, Boekaerts, Pintrich, Winne and Zimmerman in the main line of SRL, and Weinstein would be a reference in the line of SL; for saying some of them. Do not skip seeing the compilation works by Panadero (2017) and by Thoutenhoofd & Pirrie (2013) for a thoroughly review.

Unfinished research

Our team took three research projects and an in-depth review as chief references for designing a model:

• The Project LEARN (Hautamäki et al., 2002) provided three main dimensions about contextual and personal beliefs, and learning competences.
• The Project by the Centre CRELL of the European Commission (see Hoskin & Fredriksson, 2008) considered four instruments, but never got common European standards.
• The Project Tuning only provided procedures for assessing, but not reliable and valid instruments as it would be expected for evidence-based teaching and learning (González & Wagenaar, 2003).

The review by Stringher (2014) appeared to be especially useful to us. She took into account 40 definitions and 90 studies on this topic. However, our team though it would be necessary to complete this competence with an ethical dimension, which has not been included before, though the EU has considered in 2018. Finally, our initial theoretical model had five dimensions: cognitive (CD), metacognitive (MCD), affective-motivational (AMD), social/relational (SRD) and ethical (ED).

Aim and research question

Our team[1] aimed to contrast the initial model with the students’ viewpoint, assuming those concerns of the SCL. That may shed light on the ‘learning to learn’ competence and help us to achieve greater coherence and quality in the initial model. The research question was whether the university students would share our model about the competence.

[1] Funding details: National grants EDU2017-83284-R, Ministry of Economy and Business; and BOE-B-2017-72875, Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.

Participants The study was carried out with 16 students found in the following areas: Educational Sciences (n=4), Health Sciences (n=6) and Engineering (n=6). Design This study was conducted with non-probabilistic and incidental sampling, and the methods were mainly qualitative in order to get comprehensive information about the students’ views on how they learn. Instruments Participants were invited to focus groups and were asked, regarding ‘learning to learn’, what skills should be acquired by students during their university studies to become competent and responsible professionals. The coding process of the students’ views was conducted with the software QDA ATLAS.ti 8. This allowed to perform a qualitative, systematic and visual data analysis. The software facilitates the organization of the data and also the subsequent analytical discussion about them. Procedure First of all, the literature was systematically reviewed for designing an operative theoretical model, as it is always done (Gargallo, Suárez-Rodríguez, & Pérez-Pérez, 2009). After that, the students were blocked by the area of knowledge they came from (educational sciences, health sciences and engineering) and the focus groups were then carried out. Data analysis The transcriptions of the focus groups were incorporated into ATLAS.ti. First, text segments were analysed according to those codes our team defined –based on the model–. Some segments were not coded in this list, so we coded them openly as they were based on the students’ voices and not on the theoretical model. Second, a conceptual analysis was made building networks and relationships. These codes were grouped into general codes (subdimensions) and the general ones into families (dimensions) according to the initial theoretical model, but also to the words of participants. The focus groups provided information about the ‘learning to learn’ competence from the students’ point of view in a deductive-inductive analysis, which avoided reductionism as much as possible. Two parameters were taken into account for understanding the view of the students: • Density, with respect to the number of links a code has with other codes. • Groundedness, with respect to the number of times a code has been cited.

Feedback was found on the subdimensions of our model, which could be coded as: Cognitive1. Effective-information-management. Cognitive2. Oral-communication-skills. Cognitive3. Written-communication-skills. Cognitive4. ICT-management. Cognitive5. Critical-and-creative-thinking. Metacognitive6. Knowing-oneself-task-strategies. Metacognitive7. Planning-and-organization. Metacognitive8. Self-evaluation/self-control/self-regulation. Metacognitive9. Problem-solving. Affective-motivational10. Motivation-and-positive-attitude. Affective-motivational11. Internal-attributions. Affective-motivational12. Self-concept/self-esteem/self-efficacy. Affective-motivational13. Emotional-self-regulation. Social-relational14. Social-values. Social-relational15. Positive-attitudes-towards-cooperation-and-solidarity. Social-relational16. Teamwork. Social-relational17. Control-of-environmental-conditions. Ethical18. Values-and-attitudes. Ethical19. Civic/moral-attitudes/values Ethical20. Deontological-codes CD and MCD were not associated in any case to the other dimensions of the model. That sets down two qualitative ‘clusters’ we will show in detail along the poster. In the first group of relations between the ideas of the initial version of the theoretical model, it draws attentions that there were only two connections going from one dimension to the other. Students associated ‘searching, selecting and managing information’ with ‘analysing, assessing and monitoring for better performance’; and they also associated the ‘critical analysis, inference and thought’ with ‘disputing established learning objectives and setting one’s own goals’. Similarly, the point on ‘teamwork and sharing interests’ of the SRD was associated with having ‘motivation and curiosity for learning’ (see AMD); as well as ‘social skills’ (SRD) were associated with ‘being honest, responsible and respectful’ and with ‘following ethical and deontological codes in professional practices’, both in the ED. For more information, it would be interesting to consult inter-dimension connexions, which may be seen in the poster. In this line, students gave certain inter-dimension coherence. After the data analysis, university students seemed to think that the ‘learning to learn’ competence conforms to our initial theoretical model. This provides a basis for designing an evaluation instrument and defining this competence in the curriculum and in future teaching programs. Other basis may be provided by other stakeholders, such as university professors, higher education graduates and employers.

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