Abstract
This article presents four studies (on four years consecutively) assessing the impacts of an academic training of the first year of Psychology. 737 students were enrolled in the study. Satisfaction and subjective learning (level I and II of the Kirkpatrick's model) were collected by questionnaires at the end of the training course as well as variables of tendency (self-esteem, locus of control, self-efficacy, optimism) supposed to be beneficial to learning, although no causal link could have been demonstrated, favoring a normative approach of these variables. The learning objective and, for studies 3 and 4 only, the previous level of the student have also been collected. The main results allow to see links between different measures collected at the end of the training. However these variables could not be entirely predictive of the expected result. Only the optimism and the previous grade are reliable predictors of success. The predictive power of variables of tendency studied disappears even if we take into account the previous grade of the student. Indeed, they reflect more a level of an earlier success rather than a success to come, strengthening the hypothesis that those variables should be socio-normative. In the final analysis, these different studies provide a new paradigmatic approach enabling the study of the impacts of the training by the experimental social psychology which will need to be confirmed in future studies.