Today's social and labor demands require demonstrating specific knowledge and skills in Higher Education prior to graduation. In VUCA societies, it is no longer sufficient to accredit certain training hours. Therefore, over the last decade, universities worldwide have attempted to replace time-based curriculum (Kelly & Columbus, 2016) with the competence-based curriculum (Echols et al., 2018; Gargallo López, 2017). In fact, since the late 1990s, the importance of mastering some knowledge, skills, and competences to remain in the labor market has grown. At that time, the OECD launched its DeSeCo project to define and select these key competences. A few years later, the European Commission adopted the OECD’s idea for member states, defining eight key competences and including "learning to learn" (LtL). Despite several years of attempting to incorporate LtL into the curriculum of educational systems, the EU continues to stress its importance (European Commission, 2018; Sala et al., 2020). This leads us to believe that the curriculum design of LtL is still a problem, and we wondered how study plans are being designed to incorporate this competence. We are particularly concerned about European universities, where an attempt has been made to adopt a competence-based curriculum since the Bologna process, sometimes with limited success (e.g., Chies et al., 2019).

Teaching to learn is a difficult task. To begin with, the academic community has encountered difficulties even in reaching an agreement on what this entails (Deakin Crick et al., 2014), although a recent study validated the content of a theoretical model on LtL (Garcia-Garcia et al., 2022; Gargallo López et al., 2020). Perhaps this is why our country, Spain, has lacked a firm commitment to transversal competences from the outset. Sánchez‐Elvira et al. (2011) analyzed the competences in the curriculum of Spanish universities after the Bologna reform and found that only some universities had a formal and shared set of transversal competences, such as LtL, which did not reach 20% of the training offer. Nearly 25% of the institutions did not even mention these competences, neither in the degrees nor in the subjects. Nevertheless, it is necessary to incorporate LtL in the curriculum so that teachers have a framework that facilitates teaching to learn in the classroom. Otherwise, it will not be credible to include LtL in the graduate profiles and, thus, to ensure that students know how to learn on their own after graduation to face the VUCA societies’ demands.

To date, few studies have analyzed the curriculum of Spanish universities using teaching programs (e.g., García-García et al., 2020; San Martín Gutiérrez et al., 2016), even though this is where the competences originate. For this reason, we have conducted a descriptive study using the teaching programs of two degrees (i.e., Pedagogy and Telecommunications), considering the LtL contents of the theoretical model of Gargallo López et al. (2020). The study addresses the following research questions (RQs).

RQ1. How frequently do LtL components appear in the Pedagogy and Telecommunication curriculum?

RQ2. Do LtL contents appear with the same frequency in the Pedagogy and Telecommunication curriculum?

RQ3. Are LtL contents more associated with transversal competences or those applied to a specific discipline?

The answer to these research questions helps us understand how Spanish curriculum designers have incorporated LtL in both degrees and its implications for curriculum design and educational practice in Higher Education.

Sample and material We analyzed 23 Pedagogy curricula (i.e., 1,032 teaching programs) and 14 Telecommunications curricula (i.e., 864 teaching programs). We reached 98.33% of the curricula of both degrees. Therefore, the findings are representative. We reviewed 20,321 competences programmed to develop over 228,000 hours of training (i.e., 9,120 ECTS credits). We used the theoretical model of Gargallo Lopez et al. (2020) to detect the presence of LtL components; and analyzed their correlation with disciplinary competences (e.g., evaluating educational programs, analyzing guided communication systems) and transversal competences (e.g., decision-making, problem-solving). The dataset had 12,426 disciplinary and 7,895 transversal competences. Contrasting two different degrees provided external validity to the results (Esterling et al., 2021). Data management and analysis We identified the universities that offered degrees in Pedagogy and Telecommunications in the register of centers and titles (RUCT) of the Ministry of Universities of Spain. After the search, we accessed their official websites, downloaded the teaching programs of the subjects, and extracted data on the competences. When the competences had an imprecise definition, were equivocal, or consisted of activities but did not include a learning outcome, we excluded them from the analysis. We calculated the presence of LtL components in the competences of each teaching program. We recorded 1 when the component appeared and 0 when it did not appear. In this way, we obtained a matrix with binary code to express a dichotomous ordinal variable, but the data was still insufficient. The matrix did not reflect the presence of a certain component to the number of training hours of each subject. Therefore, we multiplied the (0,1) matrix by the number of credits for the subject where each competence was located. We divided the result by the total credits of the curriculum to obtain a score relative to the offer of the degree. In this way, we obtained the maximum presence (MP) of the LtL components since it is impossible to determine how much time a teacher dedicates to work on each competence. It was necessary to correct MP due to the offer of elective subjects. To do this, we multiplied MP in elective subjects * (total elective credits offered / elective credits taken by students). We then added the result to MP in mandatory subjects to obtain a corrected MP score.

Answer to RQ1 & RQ2 Critical thinking and communication skills appeared more than other LtL components in Pedagogy and Telecommunications. In both cases, there was a similar distribution in the corrected MP, although information management was more predominant in Pedagogy and problem-solving in Telecommunications. Competences related to attributing learning to self-effort and maintaining physical and emotional well-being did not appear in any teaching program. In Pedagogy, there were competences related to non-verbal communication, self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional self-regulation, and anxiety control. However, we did not find any of them in Telecommunications. Answer to RQ3 The competences with LtL components positively correlated with both the transversal competences (rho = .803, p = .000) and the disciplinary competences (rho = .703, p = .000). Therefore, the results revealed an intention to teach for learning within a specific discipline (i.e., pedagogy, telecommunications), rather than just in a transversal manner, as proposed by the EU (European Commission, 2018; Sala et al., 2020). Conclusion and implications for practice The curriculum designers focused more on information processing than on collaborative learning and on student strategies to maintain motivation. The individual learning components of LtL had a higher corrected MP than the social learning components. Although most of the curricula contemplated teamwork in a general sense, they did not incorporate the latest research developments, such as co-regulation of learning (Hadwin et al., 2019). The curriculum does include LtL components, at least in the two degrees we have analyzed, but it needs restructuring to incorporate research developments.

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