Conference Program

Learning to Learn (L2L) is a core competence for lifelong learning, as it supports individuals’ ability to autonomously organize and manage their learning pathways throughout life (Council of the European Union, 2018). The study method can be understood as the operational dimension of L2L, as it represents an integrated set of cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and organizational processes that enable students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning, consciously adapting strategies to the specific demands of different subjects. However, when this competence is not explicitly and systematically taught, its development tends to follow uneven trajectories—particularly among students with Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). In these cases, weaknesses in executive functions and self-regulation processes (APA, 2022; Barkley, 1997) hinder independent study management, time organization, deep text comprehension, and the development of effective strategic repertoires (Traversetti & Rizzo, 2023). Without targeted instructional guidance, access to the L2L competence may thus be compromised, with negative consequences for academic achievement and the fulfillment of individual potential.

This contribution presents and discusses the initial findings of a research-training project with a quasi-experimental design, involving first-year lower secondary school classes in two Italian regions. Through teacher training and the implementation of an operational toolkit, the project aims to promote students’ study methods. The assessment of study competences was conducted using the AMOS 8–15 battery (Cornoldi et al., 2005), which provides a comprehensive evaluation of cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational dimensions related to the acquisition of an autonomous and personal study approach.

A descriptive analysis of the sample, integrated with a comparison against AMOS normative data, allowed for the delineation of students’ Learning to Learn profiles at the beginning of lower secondary school. Particular attention was given to dimensions of self-regulation, organization, and study skills, and to the trajectories of students with SLDs and ADHD.

Preliminary results make it possible to discuss the extent to which the competence of “learning to study” is distributed within the sample and whether inequalities intersect with special educational needs, particularly in the presence of SLDs or ADHD. The paper concludes with reflections on the pedagogical relevance of these baseline findings in shaping evidence-based interventions on study methods—conceived from a perspective of equity and Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2018)—to support the full development of every student’s learning potential.

Learning to learn (L2L) is increasingly recognised in higher education as a key competence for lifelong learning, empowerment, and equitable participation. In European debates, it is commonly described as a hyper-competence that mobilises cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and socio-affective resources to sustain learning across contexts (Caena & Stringher, 2020; Stringher et al., 2021). However, limited attention has been paid to how learners reorganise their learning strategies when previously effective approaches become inadequate in demanding academic contexts.

To address this issue, the study situates L2L within Pellerey’s (2006) framework of “self-direction” and conceptualises it as a meta-strategic competence concerned with the reconfiguration of learning strategies. In Pellerey’s framework, learning self-direction refers to the capacity through which individuals orient and regulate their actions across life domains through processes of self-determination and self-regulation supported by strategic competencies that sustain learning regulation.

Learning to learn is conceived as the reflective capacity through which individuals reorganise their strategic competencies and reconfigure learning strategies when the mechanisms that sustain learning regulation prove insufficient (Marcuccio, 2016).

The study explores how university students manage their studies and how limitations in their strategic competencies affect their capacity for self-direction. It also proposes a pedagogical interpretation of educational counselling as a situated environment where students can reflect on their study practices, identify ineffective strategies, and develop more effective ways of directing their learning. The study contributes to the literature by conceptualising L2L as a strategic competence of learning strategy reconfiguration and by interpreting educational counselling as an institutional pedagogical dispositif through which this competence can be observed and supported.

The study is based on 298 semi-structured educational counselling sessions conducted between 2023 and 2026 with 220 students at the University of Bologna as part of the Career Guidance project. Two senior pedagogists conducted the interviews using a non-directive approach and produced detailed field notes, as interviews were not audio-recorded due to legal restraints and the formative nature of the setting. Data were analysed using an inductive and reflexive thematic approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006), with recurrent thematic patterns across sessions as the primary unit of analysis.

Findings reveal significant fragilities in students’ capacity to direct their learning. Difficulties in organising study time, sustaining concentration, and planning learning activities emerge as recurrent issues, often accompanied by performance anxiety and a perceived misalignment between effort and outcomes. The transition from secondary school to university represents a critical moment where the demand for autonomy frequently exceeds students’ strategic resources, reflecting a mismatch between institutional expectations and students’ preparedness that affects engagement and persistence (Tinto, 1975).

Interpreted through the proposed framework, these difficulties indicate limitations in the strategic competencies that sustain the regulation of learning activity. Institutional guidance can therefore be conceptualised not merely as a support service but as a pedagogically structured institutional dispositif through which learning to learn becomes observable and developmentally supported. Promoting L2L in higher education thus emerges as a structural issue of governance and equity, highlighting the need to integrate strategic learning autonomy into university guidance and retention policies.

For an equitable, inclusive, and democratic education, teacher development is an indispensable component in equipping educators with the tools necessary to address the challenges of instructional practice with a reflective, critical, and empirical stance. It is well established that, in order to teach effectively, teachers must possess a sophisticated methodological and pedagogical expertise capable of ensuring the quality of instructional design in response to the individual educational needs of their students. This constitutes a core teacher competency — one that enables educators to remain flexible within a framework of reflective professionalism, and to operationalize instruction with a critical mindset, fostering recursive reflection on the outcomes of teaching and the ongoing questioning of one's own practice, in a continuous process of rethinking and improvement that might aptly be described as a Deweyan-inspired disposition. In Italy, teacher education and training remains a highly contested issue, particularly because, to this day, no coherent and comprehensive system exists that effectively integrates both the dimensions more closely tied to career progression and salary structures, and those pertaining to the broader and more complex conception of teacher professionalism — one that moves decisively beyond the reductive view of the teacher as a mere transmitter of knowledge.

This paper reports on an experimental study developed as a follow-up to the previous national survey 'RC-RT' conducted by SApIE, carried out in third-grade primary school classes using the EBID — Evidence-Based Improvement Design methodology (cALVANI, mARZANO, 2020). The study employed a non-probability purposive sampling design, comprising 46 third-grade classes (28 experimental and 18 control) drawn from three Italian regions (Lombardy, Lazio, and Abruzzo), involving a total of 821 students, of whom 510 were enrolled in experimental classes and 311 in control classes. The project engaged teachers in implementing the instructional strategy of Reciprocal Teaching (PalincsAR, bROWN, 1984) from an inclusive perspective, following their participation in a purpose-designed professional development course, in classes that also included students with intellectual disabilities, specific learning disorders (SLD), other specific developmental disorders (SDD), and linguistic and cultural disadvantage. The program yielded substantial learning gains in the experimental classes, including among students with Special Educational Needs (SEN). Specifically, effect sizes (Kraft, 2023)for typically developing students indicated a moderate program effect, corresponding to a three-month learning advantage in the experimental group over the control group across all administered measures: reading comprehension (ES = +0.26), summarizing (ES = +0.21), and vocabulary (ES = +0.22). Students with SEN in the experimental classes demonstrated even more pronounced gains: a five-month advantage in reading comprehension over the control classes (MT Reading Test, ES = +0.38), a six-month gain in lexical enrichment reflecting a high level of effectiveness (Verbal Meaning Test, ES = +0.45), and a seven-month gain in summarizing ability (Summary Writing Test, ES = +0.56)."

Far from being regarded as the result of pure individual intellectual production, scientific knowledge and practices are now widely considered by scholars as arising from interactions among heterogeneous social actors and institutional contexts, especially when dealing with issues that are societally relevant and intersecting different understandings by scientific disciplines and social sectors (Gibbons et al., 1994; Jasanoff, 2004, Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993). In this perspective, Research infrastructures (RIs) can be regarded as socio-technical systems, with the social components – namely the engaged community of developers, users and stakeholders – playing a critical role in sustaining effectiveness and long-term sustainability.

This contribution presents a training experimentation conducted within FOSSR RI, a NextGenerationEU project aimed at fostering open science in social science research, which was proposed to the developing community of the infrastructure’s contributors, users and stakeholders. The programme aimed to complement traditional training methods by offering sessions designed to stimulate transformative learning, empowerment, and community building among researchers, technologists, and stakeholders (Spinello & Fabrizio, 2025).

The underlying premise was that incorporating transformative methodologies into the development of a research infrastructure could promote critical learning, collaborative empowerment and distributed leadership, particularly relevant in complex knowledge ecosystems where infrastructures function not only as technical platforms but also as spaces for interaction, shared problem framing and collective learning.

Within this framework, the Action Research Sessions played a central role in cultivating learning-to-learn dynamics. These sessions were developed at CNR-IRCrES as part of a research initiative to rethink the new competencies essential for social science researchers (Rizziato, 2020, 2022a, 2022b). These sessions adopted a transformative methodological approach based on systemic thinking and horizontal leadership, focusing on transformative learning for processes and competencies. This was achieved through the integration of cognitive, emotional, and volitional dimensions to develop both subjective and intersubjective awareness, encouraging participants to take an active role. They worked according to a "horizontal leadership" approach – more accurately defined as systemic and evolutionary development leadership – capable of synergistic learning within the project thanks to forms of collective refocusing on the desired impact.

The work sessions aimed to provide learners with theoretical perspectives and practical exercises to shift the focus of research towards identifying the actual beneficiaries of actions, and to reconsider the entire project from a systemic perspective. Through a combination of reflexive enquiry, co-design and experiential learning, participants were encouraged to formulate and reformulate specific “development questions” – conceived as systemic questions – to explore the feasibility of innovative ideas, and to experiment with processes in which personal, organisational and collective learning occurred simultaneously, creating value for all stakeholders.

The FOSSR experience with Action research sessions shows how learning to learn can be interpreted as a collective competence emerging within research communities engaged in collaborative knowledge production. Participatory training environments such as these create the conditions for reflexivity, shared and transformative learning aimed at community building, contributing to the development of inclusive and socially robust research communities capable of critical thinking and the co-creation of public value within Research Infrastructures.

This contribution reflects on the outcomes of a professional development path focused on the “Learning to Learn” (L2L) competence, developed as part of an internship project related to the Master’s Degree Program in Primary Teacher Education at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (academic years 2021/22–2025/26).

In line with the scientific literature that identifies L2L as a factor of equity and democracy (Deakin Crick, Stringher, Ren, 2014), the study proceeds from the hypothesis that the training program fostered among participants a broad view of competence (Hounsell, 1979), evident both in theoretical conceptualizations and in the stated pedagogical choices for school contexts.

At the same time, the research group acknowledges the complexity involved in operationalizing the construct and the presence of several critical issues in everyday educational practice. The investigation therefore aims not only to identify elements of coherence with the proposed framework, but also to highlight limitations of the training program and the professional needs of teachers, understood as key indicators for the redesign of the next three-year training program.

The research design involves teachers who hosted and supported student teachers during their internship project, former student teachers, and current student teachers, and develops through three levels of data collection:

• Investigating conceptions and practices related to L2L, and thus the persistence of professional learning over time, through an ad hoc long-term questionnaire (closed and open-ended questions) administered to cohorts from 2021/22 to 2024/25;
• Examining the relationship between the training received and enacted practices, with particular attention to implementation difficulties, through a final ad hoc questionnaire (including closed and open-ended questions) addressed to the 2024/25 and 2025/26 cohorts;
• Interpreting emerging professional development needs and contextual constraints through qualitative in-depth exploration based on focus groups conducted with mentor teachers and student teachers.

The results aim to contribute to the debate on competence-oriented teaching focused on Learning to Learn in preschool and primary school, highlighting which training devices and methodological approaches can effectively support teachers in fostering students’ autonomy and empowerment. In this perspective, the study discusses the conditions required for Learning to Learn to become a widespread democratic practice (Vainikainen, Hautamäki, 2022), rather than remaining confined to a purely theoretical dimension.

The "Learning to Learn" (L2L) competence, recognised as one of the key European competences for lifelong learning, is now considered strategic for fostering autonomy, educational equity, and active participation throughout one's life. International literature has highlighted its multidimensional nature, integrating cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and socio-relational dimensions, whilst emphasising the difficulty of observing its developmental trajectory across different educational contexts (Stringher, 2021). Despite its centrality in European documents and in the learning outcomes of higher education (European Council, 2006, 2018), pedagogical support for this competence still appears patchy, particularly during transitions between educational levels, where students are required to employ advanced self-direction strategies (Pellerey, 2006) without necessarily having received explicit training.

This paper presents some findings from an exploratory study conducted within the Primary Teacher Education Course at Sapienza University of Rome, aimed at investigating students' perceptions of study strategies (Traversetti, 2017) as an observable dimension of L2L in the university context. The research assumes that the study method, understood not as a technical repertoire but as a strategic competence capable of integrating the planning, monitoring, and regulation of learning processes, constitutes one of the most significant operational expressions of L2L in academic contexts.

Data were collected using the Strategic Skills Perception Questionnaire (QPSS) (Bay et al., 2010), administered to 157 students across the five years of the degree programme. The descriptive results show that 56.1% of participants stated that they had never participated in their previous educational experience in activities explicitly dedicated to study methods, whilst over 70% perceived the need to develop new strategies to tackle university study effectively. These data suggest that the development of strategic learning competence remains largely implicit and discontinuous across different educational levels, relying more on individual processes of adaptation than on intentional forms of pedagogical mediation.

Particularly significant is the perception that university study requires not only a greater quantitative investment of effort, but a qualitative reorganisation of learning practices, especially in relation to time management, self-monitoring, and strategic flexibility (Rizzo & Traversetti, 2024). From this perspective, the transition to higher education emerges as a critical juncture for observing latent vulnerabilities in the developmental trajectory of 'Learning to Learn' (Hautamäki et al., 2022).

Based on these perceived needs, a laboratory-based intervention was designed and launched, focusing on the organisation of study time and metacognitive reflection, through small-group activities, guided exercises, peer discussion, and critical debate. The educational framework draws on active pedagogical traditions that conceive the laboratory as a space for reflection on action and the transfer of learning (Dewey, 1938; Le Boterf, 2000), making the strategic processes involved in learning explicit and shareable.

The case of initial teacher training is particularly relevant, as supporting the strategic competence of future teachers can also influence future educational practices in school settings. The paper, therefore, reflects on the need to strengthen vertical continuity between schools and universities, so that 'Learning to Learn' does not remain an implicit and unevenly distributed competence, accessible mainly through individual resources rather than through a deliberate and equitable educational project.