Life skills education in old age. A participated-action research for improving the critical thinking
Manuela Zambianchi
A participatory action research project, which was based on the theory and methodology of life skills education programmes adapted for old age (Zambianchi, 2015) and was focused on critical thinking, was conducted at the University for Adults, Primo Levi, in Bologna. 26 subjects (11 males and 15 females, mean age 65.28) participated, filling in, at the beginning and at the end of the programme, a questionnaire on social representations of health, two items on beliefs about the Mediterranean diet and physical activity as health-promoting factors, and a test based on free associations of stimulus words such as elderly and wisdom. After the training course, a repeated-measure Anova highlighted significant changes to beliefs about healthy behaviour; positive correlations between social representations of health and beliefs about healthy behaviours also emerged.
Keywords
life skills; critical thinking; positive aging; health; wisdom.
