The paradox of learning to learn development: adapting a scale in secondary school students

Abstract

The conceptualization of the competence to learn to learn has evolved over the years, making evident the changes in both national legislative sources (LOE, 2006; LOMCE, 2013; LOMLOE, 2020), as international (European Commission, 2006; European Council, 2018), changing the name to personal, social and learning to learn competence. At the same time, there has been an evolution in conceptualization in the scientific literature. This article presents the process of designing and validating a scale to measure the self-perception of the level of development of this competence, focusing on the most cognitive and metacognitive dimensions, in line with the European legislative framework in force during the research process. The study focuses on a sample of 1033 secondary education students from public, subsidized and private schools in the Community of Madrid, a population of interest in research for psychopedagogical guidance purposes. Validation is carried out through the double process of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with different samples obtained from the total sample. The analysis of criterial validity is carried out by analyzing the relationship of competence and its dimensions with learning approaches and academic self-efficacy. The results show an adequate internal consistency of the scale, obtaining a factorial structure of three factors (Self-evaluation of the process, Self-knowledge as a learner and Management of the learning process), factors that explain 39.9% of the variance. The scale presents goodness of fit indices appropriate to the postulated theoretical model. The relationship of competence and its dimensions with age and with the academic year is negative, in line with a part of the scientific literature that explains this result from emotional factors such as motivation that simultaneously decreases throughout secondary education.

Keywords: learning processes, competence, self-regulation, metacognition, self-efficacy, learning motivation, secondary education.