Purpose: This article focuses on the assessment of entrepreneurship competence by selected vocational teachers in Italy. The exploratory research question addresses the extent to which entrepreneurship assessments are competence based, and the research seeks to identify fully fledged assessment programmes with both a formative and summative…

Grades are the universal tool for measuring students' performance at school. However, other competency-based evaluation methods have shown to have a stronger impact on the learning quality. We investigated how different methods are collectively represented and discursively constructed among students at an Italian high school class. Thematic…

Ensuring equity in education is a goal for sustainable development. Among the factors that hinder equity, socioeconomic status (SES) has the highest impact on learning Mathematics. This paper addresses the issue of equity at the secondary school level by proposing an approach based on adopting automatic formative assessment (AFA). Carefully…

Teachers' beliefs about students' errors are influenced by structural factors and by other beliefs towards education and students that teachers may hold. The literature on this topic has provided some evidence and some mixed results. Furthermore, some structural aspects related to errors have not been considered in framing teachers' beliefs about…

Soft skills are interpersonal, communication, and personal attributes that enable individuals to interact effectively with others in personal and workplace settings. Despite the significance of soft skills for career success, these skills are not necessarily taught in traditional academic settings. Consequently, education institutions must adopt…

World university rankings have had an impact on academic competition worldwide. The comparability of ranking results depends on how data is collected within each university. When data concepts are interpreted differently, data variety is introduced and ranking results cannot be used in a meaningful manner. In this case study, the effect of…

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the usefulness of educational software among teachers in Italy (N = 559). The evaluation of usefulness was conducted on the latest and most popular web-based software used by European teachers, namely: Quizizz, Mentimeter, Wakelet, Padlet, Canva, Emaze, Answergarden, Jamboard, Coggle, Createley, Wordwall,…

Feedback is crucial for improving student learning. In this regard, overcoming the transmissive conception of feedback in favour of its dialogic function introduces new reflections concerning the internal generative feedback process. In this regard, Nicol [(2020). The power of internal feedback: Exploiting natural comparator processes.…

The widespread adoption of school autonomy with accountability reforms in education has generated debate regarding the relationship between autonomy, innovation and accountability. While at the policy design level, these three elements are highly related, several authors highlight the contradictions among them. By analyzing key documents and…

This cross-national European comparison examined gender representation and stereotypes in mathematics and language textbooks from Germany, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Romania. The results showed that female characters were numerically underrepresented. Female characters were also less often a main character or individually portrayed…

The unprecedent times of the COVID-19 pandemic have had a relevant impact on schooling. In this context, identifying the features of effective and responsive teachers' professional development paths in the assessment domain has never been as critical as it is today. However, despite the widespread interest in teacher assessment literacy and…

Despite a decline in sexist language, traditional gender beliefs remain embedded in the scientific literature on reproductive biology and consequently continue to distort knowledge, encumber the learning process, and reinforce gender essentialism. This article analyzes the enduring force of gender stereotypes in Italian middle school science…

In recent decades, there has been rapid development in digital technologies for automated assessment. Through enhanced possibilities in terms of algorithms, grading codes, adaptivity, and feedback, they are suitable for formative assessment. There is a need to develop computer-aided assessment (CAA) tasks that target higher-order mathematical…

A hospital-based school is offered to hospitalised children with the aim of promoting school continuity and preventing disengagement from school; children have the chance to attend a hospital-based school with hospital teachers during long recoveries. The aim of this study is to obtain an in-depth understanding of hospital teaching: which training…

The use of virtual labs in higher education is gaining growing interest, with different debates in the literature about their role in addressing learning outcomes and balancing hands-on activities. This study seeks to understand how labs can be virtualised and thus structured to contribute to engineering education, by adopting an innovative…