The collaboration with CNR-IRPI

The relationship began in 2018 and takes the form of a licence to use the material and to train the trainers. The work concerns the Fondamentali dell'Apprendimento®, a set of pre-functional cognitive gestures: defining precisely, telling neighbouring concepts apart, breaking a concept into its elements, building categories, restating in one's own words, making a logical step explicit and justifying it.

The material was developed by CNR-IRPI researchers together with the SaperCapire team, with reference to the research line on the improvement of expressive and learning abilities in adults, based at the Turin site of the institute. Our people were trained by that team before teaching any of it.

The observational study presented at AIRIPA

An observational study on 1,007 young adults was presented at the 2020 congress of AIRIPA. The study describes what happened in a real population of participants, and it is not a controlled trial.

The academic recognition

IUL, an Italian online university, granted scientific endorsement to Genio in 21 giorni — the course from which LEARNIS Mind developed — with a resolution of 25 November 2024, announced on 6 December 2024. The recognition includes the possibility of up to 12 university credits, six in the psychology area and six in the general and social pedagogy area. A credit recognition says that an academic body examined the content and found it consistent with its own curriculum. It says nothing about the results of any individual participant.

The instrument we use to read a starting point

AMOS — Abilità e Motivazione allo Studio — is a profiling battery published by Erickson and developed by Cornoldi, De Beni and Meneghetti. It describes study habits in depth, analysing a person's prevailing cognitive styles: the strategies they actually use, how coherent their method is, how they organise themselves, what they believe about their own ability and how they handle anxiety.

The profile is shared with the participant: it is their information, and it is the starting point the path is built on.

The work with the Engineers' Foundation in Turin

The C1 module — the component that LEARNIS Mind integrates with the historical method — was built through work carried out between 2015 and 2019 with the Foundation of the Order of Engineers of the Province of Turin. Adults in technical professions are a demanding test bed for a comprehension method: they have no patience for anything that sounds like a memory trick.

The theoretical frame

The reference is Jack Mezirow's work on transformative learning. The distinction matters and we keep it: transformative learning is what happens inside a person; Transformative Education is what an organisation arranges so that it can happen. We claim the second. Mezirow's titles are listed in our bibliography and are available from any academic library — we did not build our method from them, we recognised our own practice in them years after the practice existed.

Research specifications

The purpose of the studies presented in this section is solely observational, as it does not prove causation. Academic endorsements concern content, not outcomes. Licences from research institutes mean that we were authorised to use material and to train our trainers on it. We claim no clinical evidence that a particular person will improve by a particular amount in a particular time. Documented results are based on 20+ years of documented practice and are statistical in their inherent nature.