Dal liceo all’università: una ricerca-intervento per la costruzione del progetto di vita professionale degli studenti

The first part of an intervention-research, inspired on the theory of narrative thought, the principles of educational counseling and guidance in teaching, was concluded on May 15th 2019. During the school year 2018-2019, students (n=93, 50 females and 43 males) attending the fourth year of high school in Palermo, participated in an experimental initiative in which schools and university collaborated with a dual purpose: 1) to reduce in the students the gap between the acquired knowledges at the end of high school courses and those required at the beginning of university courses and, 2) to strengthen the ability to formulate their own professional life project. The joint action of three types of interventions was experimented: expressive writing to prefigure one’s own educational-professional future, the guidance interview to exercise one’s decision-making skill and the conduction of afternoon teaching workshops held by a university professor and a high school teacher from the same discipline. It was intended to verify if the participation in this initiative would facilitate, in high school students, the development of three transversal skills that significantly affect the process of maturation of the educational-professional choice: the adequate image of the current «oneself», the perceived self-efficacy and the decision-making skill. The initial assessment of the development degree of the three skills that were intended to promote, was carried out firstly, in November 2018 and lastly but not least, in May 2019. Moreover, an intermediate assessment of the current «oneself» image was carried out in January and March 2019. The statistical t-test was used to verify the significance of the «pre-post» differences. There is, not only a significant difference in the construct of self-efficacy (p = 0.004) but also in the «energy» dimension of the current «oneself» image (p = 0.0002). After carrying out the activities, the students perceive themselves as more able of dealing with school tasks.