Relevance. Knowledge of the spontaneous development of learning skills (LS) of University students is important and relevant, because the lack of LS adversely affects the success of independent learning, reducing the level of social and professional mobility of students and their competitiveness in the labor market.

Objective. Determining the dynamics and extent of spontaneous development of basic and additional LS students with an engineering profile in usual side developmental   nature of learning at the University, as well as of their relationship with academic performance.

Methods. For the diagnosis of basic LS specially designed tasks to build knowledge on the material of technical disciplines were used. Additional LS were tested using the author's questionnaire with scaling.  

Sample. 135 students of the 1st, 4th and 6th courses of technical universities of Moscow: 89 boys and 46 girls aged 18 to 33 years.

Results.  During the full 6-year course of study, students of engineering profile showed an increase in the level of basic LS: non-independent knowledge building (+31.25%), independent knowledge building (+12%), mixed knowledge building (+81.96%). The growth of additional skills as conscious work with the cognitive sphere (+2.8%) and with emotional states (+13.33%) was established, but the ability to work with motives and volitional regulation decreased (-8.18%),  as well as to work with knowledge as learning objectives (-16.12%), and to plan the order and time of activities (-10.21%).

Conclusion. It is necessary to take into account the reduced opportunities of students in decoding and generalization in the process of obtaining knowledge from messages with their ambiguity and a large amount of specific content. These types of basic LS need to be purposefully developed. The negative dynamics in the development of a number of additional LS also indicates the need for their special development at the University.

Two approaches to teaching the ability to learn in the Russian psychological and pedagogical sciences are analyzed in the article. The first one means we teach the ability to learn directly and the second focuses on developing this ability by changing the content and forms of learning. We come to the conclusion about the connection between these approaches with understanding the specifics of learning.