FROM PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL FACTORS TO IMPROVE COMPETENCES THROUGH THE LEARNING PROCESS

In the last years the Spanish universities have developed plans for the implementation of ECTS (European Credit Transfer System). In this context, several studies have proposed that the results obtained by the students depend basically on the learning process against their psychological and biographical characteristics of students. We consider that psychological and biographical factors are a potential base to the students' results. However, these factors alone cannot guarantee high results. We suggest that the effect of psychological and biographic aspects on the students' results will depend on the extent to which students are able to take advantage of their personal capabilities to develop an effective learning process. Thus, the aim of this paper is to study the mediating role of the learning process to explain the relationships between several psychological and biographical characteristics and the students' results.

The study is conducted on several groups of students from different subjects and courses of the University of Castilla-La Mancha. They filled in a questionnaire to measure the main factors of the model. Therefore, we have established scales on psychological aspects of students -internal control, need of achievement, power need, risk-taking, ambiguity propensity, autonomy and optimism- and on biographical factors –age, gender, job experience and qualification to enter university-. Furthermore, we have established five groups of questions to measure the learning process as a mediating factor: information about the teaching plan, training process, learning techniques, information about the evaluation system and students' effort. Finally, we have included several measures of the students' results –satisfaction with the learning process, satisfaction with the score obtained and improvement of generic and specific competences-. We have applied statistic techniques to contrast the theoretical model.

We propose that the learning process represents an interceding factor, which is able to bridge the gaps in the psychological and biographical factors and the students' results relationship. The results allow us to extract relevant conclusions to favour the learning results. We also propose several recommendations to professors and institutions. Furthermore, we propose future researches to reach a better knowledge about the role of the learning process.