The performance of the Learning to Learn (LTL) competence is considered key to the improvement and adaptation of people in a rapidly changing socio-economic and cultural context, and as an element of business and industrial innovation, acquiring, in turn, great relevance in the socio-political context. This frame of reference drives the need for educational structures to pay special attention to the LTL competence, and to promote its development (Stringher, 2014) (European Comission, 2018).

Research on AaA has typically developed within two initially separate but eventually converging research paradigms: the cognitive psychology paradigm and the socio-cultural paradigm.

The cognitive psychological perspective traditionally examines how humans process information and/or construct new knowledge in terms of internal cognitive processes. From this perspective, the human brain is sometimes understood as a “processor” and theories about how information is collected, processed, stored, and searched are discussed (Cano, 2008; Gargallo et al, 2016; Pintrich, 2004).

       The social/cultural perspective also examines how knowledge, skills, and attitudes are constructed. However, the difference is that the focus is on the social dynamics of learning rather than on internal cognitive processes. In the field of education, Bernstein and Vygotsky developed sociocultural theories, which are based on the premise that learning is embedded in a social context and develops through social interaction, highlighting the importance of learning relationships, learning communities, and the social production of competencies.

During the last decade, various actions have been carried out in the university system to teach the AaA competence, basically focused on teaching learning and self-regulation strategies (Hautamäki et al., 2002; Deakin-Crick, Boradfoot, & Claxton, 2004; Moreno, 2002). Almost all of them involve extracurricular programs that teach how to handle relevant components of the competence. But our approach is that the teaching of the competence is should be integrated into the curriculum of the subjects through specific intervention programs, so that teachers teach students AaA in the subject itself, working on the usual curricular contents. We understand that this option is appropriate due to its functionality and simplicity in its application, and because the learning activities carried out can be consolidated as another relevant element of the training curriculum, favouring the generalization and transfer of learning (Gargallo et al. 2021).

Based on this approach, we have carried out this work as a part of a research project [1]to teach the AaA competence in the subject “Moral Education for Citizenship” in the 4th year of the Pedagogy degree at the University of Valencia, choosing the essay technique as a teaching, learning and evaluation methodology, to work on some of the especially relevant dimensions of the AaA competence.

To achieve this, a training program consisting of nine sessions of thirty minutes each is applied, which seeks to improve:

• Metacognitive skills
• Information management skills
• Critical thinking.
• Written expression skills.
• The bibliographic citation and referencing system.
• The ethical/deontological commitment.

The objective of the research is for students to increase their level of mastery of the AaA competence through the application and evaluation of a training program focused on specific dimensions and subdimensions of said competence, focusing on the technique of the academic essay. We believe that, if we achieve good results, our proposal could be useful to European researchers and academics as a model for intervention.

[1]‘The learning to learn competence in the university, its design and curriculum development. a model of intervention and its application in university degrees’ Project PID2021-123523NB-I00, funded by the MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe

A quasi-experimental cohort design was used, which presents the following scheme: This is a design made up of two cohorts. The first cohort - control cohort - is the students from the previous year, to whom the AaA competence questionnaire has been administered. The second cohort - experimental cohort - is the students from the year in which the intervention program has been implemented. The sample consisted of 69 subjects belonging to the two cohorts, belonging to the 4th year fourth year students of the Pedagogy degree of at the Faculty of Philosophy and Education Sciences of the University of Valencia, belonging to two cohorts. The control cohort consisted of 48 students (43 women and 5 men) (Group PB) and the experimental cohort by of 21 students (19 women and 2 men) (Group PA). Creo que así queda mejor y nos evitamos los dos belonging seguidos. Two assessment instruments have been used: the CECAPEU questionnaire and a rubric developed for the case. The CECAPEU questionnaire, developed and validated by the research team (Gargallo et al., 2021), is an instrument made up of 85 items that are assessed on a Likert-type scale with five degrees of agreement-disagreement. The items allow students to collect their perception of their management of the competence in the five dimensions assessed (Cognitive, Metacognitive, Affective-Motivational, Social-Relational and Ethical) and in the different subdimensions that comprise it. The rubric with 18 items was developed to collect evidence of the handling and level of mastery of the competence by evaluating the two essay submissions. It is a relevant instrument, since it allows the analysis of the students' skills in an authentic task -essay- and from an authentic assessment perspective, which assesses the students' real performance and not only their perception of the handling of the competence, which is the only thing that self-report questionnaires allow to collect. To assess the submissions with the rubric, a three-level assessment scale was used (low 1; medium 2; and high level 3).

The results indicate that, at a global level, the students in the experimental group on which the training programme has been implemented have increased their level of mastery of the AaA competence in those subdimensions on which the most direct intervention has been carried out. However, there are clear differences between the results obtained in the application of the CECAPEU questionnaire and those obtained with the Rubric. The level of global mastery of the competence and its dimensions, evaluated in its general use by means of the CECAPEU questionnaire, whether we compare the experimental group with the control group, or if we compare only the results of the experimental group, only presents significant increases in one of the five dimensions of the AaA competence: the cognitive dimension. This result seems to be due to the fact that the questionnaire raises questions that cover all the dimensions of the AaA competence, while in the educational programme only specific aspects of some of these dimensions and subdimensions were worked on, so it was not foreseeable that significant improvements would occur in the global mastery of the competence. The results obtained with the rubric and assessing the effectiveness of the training program applied to the experimental group are very different. There is a statistically significant increase in all the subdimensions of the AaA competence involved in the execution of the essay task (Planning, Self-Assessment, Information search, Elaboration, Organization, Comprehension, Management of ICTs, Communication skills, Critical Thinking, etc.), except for Honesty, values, and responsibility, which starts from high values and in which there is hardly any increase. Consequently, we can point out that the implementation of the training program produced an increase in scores in the subdimensions of the AaA competence, with a mostly large effect size.

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