Reflexivity in Higher Education - Research and Models of Intervention for Underachieving Students

There is a rapidly increasing demand to implement formative methods in university contexts to promote reflexive competences. Underachieving university students often evince reflexive impairments when dealing with specific university–related events and relationships, or specific developmental milestones (transition to university, fundamental exams, etc.). Fostering reflexivity can be conducive for them to improving their active participation and inclusion to university contexts. The book aims at contributing to the debate on reflexive process as well as on the role that narrative devices can play to foster it. It also aims at discussing the difficult conditions of many university students, the need of promoting key competences and to test novel formative methods in order to improve students’ academic performance. Many contributors by different European scholars will be presented. Much of them are aimed at discussing the European Project INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn) founded in 2011 within the Erasmus Multilateral Project. INSTALL adopts an innovative narrative and multimodal methodology, the Narrative Mediation Path (NMP), i.e. a narrative formative method devised and tested with underachieving university students lagging behind with their studies.