“Know Yourself” a strategic prerequisite to encourage academic studies.

In the university studies the construction of significant learning takes place when the role of the teacher or tutor changes from informer and transmitter into facilitator of learning. This methodology promotes a student-protagonist that can develop and improve his/her talents starting from: (i) a clear self-knowledge; (ii) the self-assessment of skills; (iii) the self-regulation of abilities. If one of the main objectives of the education should be to provide to the students the opportunity to regulate their own independent learning, our research team starts from a more general purpose: to provide to the students enrolled in the academic scientific courses the possibility to understand how learning takes place and how it can be regulated. Starting from learning styles methodology, we built a blended-learning course entitled "Know yourself. Discover your learning styles" based on metacognitive strategies. The aim of this course is to decrease dropouts improving student motivation and academic performance. The course “Know yourself” leads the students to reflect on the possibilities to change or improve their way to attend the academic courses and prepare the exams, starting from the analysis of the approach to the knowledge. The used learning environment is the e-learning Moodle platform. After an introductory seminar, the students start to work in the platform. The on-line pathway offers teaching materials and several activities (video, readings and collaborative activities) that give the opportunity to the students to: - know and strengthen their learning styles; - reflect about their way to organize the study; - rethink the implemented strategies to assimilate the knowledge and test their skills. At the end of the course we proposed to fill in an evaluation questionnaire of the course, focusing the attention on the strengths and weaknesses. In this work we intend to analyze the students’ perceptions about the course and their opinion on the possibility to extend the proposed methodology to specific topics of the university courses which should require a more extended support.