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 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...
