The idea of biological evolution is not accepted by many people around the world, with a large disparity amongst countries. Some factors may act as obstacles to the acceptance of evolution, such as religion, a lack of openness to experience, and not understanding the nature of science. Although the strength of the association between evolution acceptance and non-scientific factors varies among...
Despite of countless financial resources at the European and Italian national level, the availability of training and many best practices as teaching resources, STEM education struggles to be integrated in the school system in holistic way. Starting from a reflection on the key points and actors involved with STEM practices in schools this contribution intends to highlight the critical points...
Recently, the Physical Review Physics Education Research journal organised two calls for papers focused collection to “examine and challenge” quantitative (2017) and qualitative methods (2021) in that field. Both calls had a subtitle, “a critical examination”, which foretells the need to focus on these two methodological paradigms, not taking them for granted, inviting to reposition them in...
Learning mathematics is a general problem in Italy, but it is more relevant for females. Male students typically outperform their female classmates in maths test scores from the earliest years of schooling, and the gap worsens as school grades progress.
The different experiences and expectations about potential abilities of boys and girls are key to understanding the possible causes of the...
Learning achievements are usually assessed by administering tasks to students- ranging from individual assessment to Large-scale surveys. Task design and administration are key issues in an assessment process. In the last decades, quantitative research investigated systemic changes in assessment modality, such as how the switching from a paper-and pencil administration of a task to a...
Studying reasoning lines students deploy when dealing with problematic situations is, in Education Research, one of the most important aims. The reasoning lines can be achieved by analysing the answers that students give to a questionnaire, although it becomes increasingly complicated as the number of students to be analysed increases. In my speech I focus on a quantitative method based on...
The diagnosis of the a-priori weaknesses of students based on their features and past experience (e.g. age, sex, type of diploma) together with the features of the social context represents one of the preliminary assessment activities that can be taken into consideration so as to define different typologies of students and then develop a tailored learning programme for each student group. This...
In recent years, exploring the determinants that may influence students’ achievement has received much attention. Empirical studies have found that the most important factors which affect student performance are students’ characteristics, family background, school attended, and regional residence.
This paper aims at investigating the differences in students' performances among Science,...
The importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects has been growing in different economic sectors and in general for society as a whole (Murphy et al., 2019). Nevertheless, there are significant concerns in STEM education (Höhne et al., 2019) mainly related to the students' difficulties in achieving successful academic performances, the high dropout rates, and...
By 11 March 2020, the phrase “COVID-19” had officially entered everyday life across most of the word. Each level of education suddenly faced new changes and new challenges. Emergency remote teaching became widespread, and new methodologies to deliver classes and courses were adopted by educational institutions. In February 2020, the Politecnico di Milano introduced a series of focused and...
We administered FMCE concept inventory (Thornton and Sokolof, 1998) at the beginning of college studies to young Physics and Engineering freshmen of the University of Trieste during the Academic Year 2021- 2022. We wanted to spotlight if there were influences on the Physics knowledge acquired involved by the context of instruction (Bao and Redish, 2006). We provided the Italian translation of...
We combined qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate the role of virtual simulations in the evolution of primary school students' mental models about electrostatics with respect to the target school scientific model of microscopic charges by analyzing the answers of two groups of 9/10 years old pupils inside instructional sequences that combined two hands-on real (R) activities...
The education of responsible citizens, capable of becoming active members of society, is one of the goals of the European Commission (Hazelkorn, 2015). It aims to create conditions for science education that foster students' understanding of the complexity of the world of which they are a part. Green Comp, a framework developed by the European Commission (Bianchi et al., 2022) recognizes...
In STEM education, the identity framework is often used to investigate students’ intention to pursue a STEM-related career. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between physics identity, interest, recognition, and performance-competence in physics. The analysis was based on a Likert-scale survey aimed at measuring the addressed constructs, administered online to N = 1135...
The process of globalisation has shown that countries can play a key role on the international stage provided that their citizens are given the opportunity to build a significant background in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). One of the critical issues regarding the low number of degrees in STEM faculties is the considerable dropout rate in the first years of higher...
We describe how we approached a study on a group of 65 primary school prospective teachers (PPTs) aimed at investigating through post-assessment questions, worksheets and final interviews how they would project a learning path on the subject of "heat, temperature and energy" after following a short didactic module involving the use of infrared thermal cameras and temperature online...
Despite many attempts to measure pupils and students' learning outcomes, their performance in problem solving has largely remained something of a black box. This talk will therefore focus on the potential of using eye-tracking data in combination with the think-aloud method. Case studies will be used to show how to analyze data from actual science education research. Finally, further...
Education stakeholders in times of the Covid-19 pandemic require a broad empirical base to recover from the crisis and to strengthen the resilience of education systems in the future. National assessments of students learning outcomes are potentially useful sources of education data during the COVID-19 pandemic, playing a pivotal role in monitoring school systems and improving education...
The study of gender differences in mathematics attainment has exponentially increased over time as closing the gap between boys and girls is a priority for both research and policy. Mathematics has in fact been listed by the European Commission as one of the ‘key competences’ necessary to all for personal fulfilment and development. Nonetheless, there are still several countries around the...
In this talk, we first briefly discuss the definitions of Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics, providing an overview of the most used statistical methods in both fields, as well as a synopsis of their differences and similarities. The possible aims of the different methods, aimed at uncovering hidden patterns in educational data, are stressed pointing to the possible services...
Amongst the extensive research conducted in the context of gender gaps in educational context, an issue that is frequently examined is the role of pre-university education and of the study of STEM subjects, in particular mathematics. The impact of how this discipline is taught, along with the relative attitudes to and interest in this subject, seem to be the main factors pushing young people,...
In the most recent years an effort of INVALSI has been addressed to the match of its large scale population data with other sources of administrative/survey data. Technical difficulties and privacy limitations made this process complex and challenging, however, a first linked dataset has been recently developed joining together data from INVALSI, MIUR and University Register . This joint...
The purpose of the session is to show how, thanks to the opportunities disclosed by the development of practices related to the idea of Open Research, it is possible (even for an independent researcher) to address issues of great cognitive and practical importance through the combination of high-quality open data, accessible computing tools and advanced statistical models.
Specifically, the...
The fight against early school leaving, the prevention of school failure, the raising of basic skills levels and support for learning are among the main objectives of the interventions financed through projects activated in favor of schools. The study is aimed at quantifying the effect on the levels of competence achieved by students in the INVALSI tests through interventions aimed at (i)...
The socio-cultural and economic characteristics of students and the families from which they come play a very important role on the learning levels achieved, even from the early years of schooling. It is well established, in fact, that students who live in conditions of higher economic as well as social and cultural advantage have a better chance of achieving more satisfactory results during...
This talk will present a summary of what I wish I had known 30+ years ago as I began my Ph.D. studies with Ben Wright and first learned Rasch methods. In this talk I will present key errors beginners commonly make when they start to use Rasch. Naturally I will briefly discuss the ins and outs of such beginner Rasch errors…my goal..to aid Rasch novices so that they can confidently, quickly and...
This work describes the new procedures of automated corrections of freeform answers given by the 8th, 10th and 13th grade students to open-ended questions in CBT Computer Based Test) INVALSI tests. INVALSI team, composed of statistical and computer scientists, responsible of open-ended question correction, has implemented an algorithm to process text strings of different complexity.
Before...
