The learning to learn competence and its relationship with academic performance in health sciences students

Abstract

Learning to learn (LtL) is a concept present in the literature since the 80s of the last century. The European Commission established it as a key competency for the European educational systems. Generally speaking, it has been thought that this competence was a teaching-learning objective for pre-university education because university students handled it adequately when beginning their higher studies, also assuming that their management improved throughout these studies. However, there is not enough data in this regard. In this study we tried to concrete how university students of Health Sciences handled the competence, what were the usage profiles and how LtL was related to academic performance. We worked with a sample of 396 subjects from different courses of three degrees in Health Sciences at the University of Valencia, by using the QELtLCUS questionnaire to assess the competence. The level of competence management for all the sample was acceptable, although with low scores in some relevant components. Two groups of subjects with two different management profiles were found, one of them high and the other one lower. Those subjects with high level of proficiency had better scores than those ones with less management, with significant differences. It was also found that the management of LtL was a good predictor for academic performance in both groups. No significant differences were found in LtL according to gender, age and academic grade. These results justify the need for teaching the competence systematically in university degrees and some guidelines are provided for this.