Abstract

Learning to learn, a competence among the eight European competences, engages the acquisition and self-consciousness of the personal learning processes. Learning to learn does not mean just cognition, metacognition and thinking procedures, but engages the emotional, relational and social dimensions too. From a European perspective, we can distinguish the research on this competence in two different and opposite theoretical approaches. There are theories that focus on cognitive processes (Hautamaki et al., 2014) which consider the essence of this competence the ability and the will to face new tasks. Other theories focus on personality traits (Heckamn, 2016), such as the Character skills, competences considered important for the labour market, for education and for other different contexts. Both approaches stress the educability of the learning to learn competence and the fundamental role the school can play to promote the self-efficacy and the aptitudes that have an upmost influence - negatively or positively - in engaging students in learning to learn, throughout their lives. Moreover, the theme of the measurement of this competence is very interesting: its definition as a composite competence requires a variety of methodologies and instruments that also take into account social, relational and cultural aspects.