The role of special education teachers is currently facing an extensive renewal process closely related to the professional transition from a narrow understanding of special education, rooted in the deficit paradigm, to a broader vision of inclusion as a whole-school and community action. Within such a process, student teachers' professional…

Anxiety is one of the most commonly investigated topics in the field of foreign language education; however, foreign language anxiety is attributed to learners extensively even though most teachers suffer from high levels of anxiety both as language teachers and language users while teaching. In this study, foreign language teaching anxiety is…

The vast majority of studies concerning the implementation of quality assurance in higher education institutions have been conducted from a national perspective, with few cross-national studies. This study aimed to explore the implementation of quality assurance standards in Europe from a comparative perspective. A questionnaire based on…

This report aims to provide insight into the realities faced by higher education academic staff at a time of fast-moving change and increasing societal demand. Fluctuating student numbers, new funding and steering mechanisms are among the features of today's European higher education landscape, but not enough is known about how academic staff are…

After nearly 20 years of evaluation in Italian higher education, a new national agency for the evaluation of the university system (ANVUR) came into being in 2011. This article traces the history of evaluation in Italian universities, discussing the tasks assigned to the national evaluation bodies and their functions within the university system.…

The practice of teaching a foreign language in primary schools in Italy was first officially provided for by a decree in 1985, but it was only in 1991 that the figure of the Foreign Language (FL) teacher was actually defined. The issue at that stage was how to select and train the prospective L2 teachers, and so in-service courses were organised…

This article reports the findings of a PhD study, which offers comparative perspectives on teacher education in a period of reforms, inquiring into stakeholders' perceptions in English, French, Italian and Spanish contexts as case studies. The interaction of needs and constraints in European initial teacher education within higher education…

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between…

The article investigates the issue of teaching evaluation in higher education, providing a picture of the phenomenon into the Italian specific context within a European dimension. Starting from the premise that in Italian universities, teaching evaluation is based on general indicators which reflect a simplification of a complex phenomenon,…

An international team of experts from Belgium, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Turkey and the USA employed a questionnaire to identify the deontology of teachers from infant to secondary school in eight countries. The survey was implemented between 2004 and 2007. The socio-cultural concept of "Verstehen" (understanding) as described in the work…

Since 1999, Italian Universities have been monitoring teaching using students opinions to improve the quality of the education process. The acceleration of the evaluation has been promoted by ministerial laws, that have obliged Universities to write reports containing the main results. In this paper, the aim is to find a method to classify the…