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…

This paper explores school principals' and teachers' views of the Italian teachers' appraisal system and related indicators. In particular, the research aimed at examining the opinions of school principals and teachers regarding the domains to be considered for teacher appraisal purposes. An investigation involving 37 school principals and 868 in…

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…

A significant challenge in studying formative assessment is the lack of suitable instruments for assessing teachers' formative assessment practices. This paper reports the development of the Teacher Formative Assessment Practice Scale (TFAPS) and its psychometric properties based on two samples of primary and secondary school teachers: one from…

Background: 'Learning to Learn' (L2L) is considered a key skill for the twenty-first century. It is understood here as a hyper-competence, which mobilises resources of the individual and/or groups in a sense-making effort to improve or update one's own learning. By means of classroom assessment during the teaching-learning cycle, teachers can…

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…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to examine the perspectives, experiences, roles and values of Italian primary school principals regarding the inclusion of migrant children. Design/methodology/approach: The method of the study is qualitative and consists of a semi-structured interview, which was carried out with 17 primary school principals and…

Theory of mind refers to the ability to attribute beliefs to oneself and others. The present study used a dynamic systems approach to assess how environment may affect the development of second-order theory of mind (e.g., "John knows that Mary knows that he went out yesterday"). Theory of mind is divided into two major dimensions:…

Item response theory (IRT) models are the main psychometric approach for the development, evaluation, and refinement of multi-item instruments and scaling of latent traits, whereas multilevel models are the primary statistical method when considering the dependence between person responses when primary units (e.g., students) are nested within…

This paper reports on a European project, the Comenius ECLIPSE project (European Citizenship Learning in a Programme for Secondary Education) developed by six European partners coordinated by the University of Trento in the years 2011-2014. ECLIPSE (co-financed by the EACEA--Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency) aims at developing,…

The dissemination of good practices in MLE requires a more rigorous definition of their characteristics, including criteria and indicators to measure their quality. This article -- after reflecting on the meaning and function of identifying good MLE practices -- presents a systematic framework of 35 indicators for good MLE activities in Italian…

In this paper we discuss a study on the approaches to modeling of students of the 4-year elementary school teacher program at the University of Palermo, Italy. The answers to a specially designed questionnaire are analyzed on the basis of an "a priori" analysis made using a general scheme of reference on the epistemology of mathematics…

We investigated the role of number agreement on verb and of animacy in the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in 51 monolingual Italian-speaking children, mean age 9:33, tested through a self-paced listening experiment with a final comprehension question. A "digit span test" and a "listening span test" were…

According to multicomponent models (Oakhill & Cain, 2007a), text comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text or from previous knowledge), and involves various components. This study investigated (a)…

The conceptual categories that underlie the business analysis of intellectual capital are relevant to providing an explanation of school performance. By gathering data on student learning, this research provides empirical evidence for the use of school results as an accurate indicator of the effectiveness of the management of public education.…