Promoting academic success among undergraduate students is crucial for tackling the need to foster employability competencies. Low levels of academic attainment in higher education, along with the increasing number of persons participating in tertiary education, represent crucial trends, which need to be studied in order to develop efficient retention practices. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between relevant factors that can foster academic success: learning strategies, future orientation, and academic self-efficacy. To this purpose, a longitudinal study was performed on a sample of N = 87 undergraduate students from one of the largest Italian universities (63.4% males, 74.2% enrolled in the first year). Participants filled in an online questionnaire at two different time points, with a time lag of 12 months. Results of a moderated mediation model indicated that the relationship between learning strategies at Time 1 (T1) and Grade Point Average (GPA) at Time 2 (T2) was mediated by students’ future orientation. Moreover, this association was moderated by T1 academic self-efficacy. These results suggest that learning strategies positively influence GPA through an enhanced future orientation, in particular when students report high or medium levels of self-efficacy. The current findings invite a thorough review of training interventions for improving academic achievement.
The article presents the structure of the evaluation design -and main results -used in the project of international cooperation between Europe and Latin America called Alfa III -TRALL (Transatlantic Lifelong Learning. Rebalancing Relations) and the experience of one project partner, the Universidad Católica Boliviana, has been adopted as an example. The design implemented meets the need to evaluate the quality of lifelong learning courses promoted by 15 Latin American universities, partners of the project, and aims to trigger virtuous circles of progressive improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of the training offer. This * El ensayo ha sido diseñado y compartido en todas sus partes por todos los autores. En particular, los párrafos 2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.3.1 han sido elaborados por Maurizio Betti; los párrafos 1, 2.4, 2.4.1, 2.4.2 y 4 han sido elaborados por Ira Vannini y los párrafos 3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 han sido elaborados por
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.