For over two decades now, the application of Citizen Science to Education has been evolving, and fundamental topics, such as the drivers of motivation to participate in Citizen Science projects, are still under discussion. Some recent developments, though, like the use of Artificial Intelligence to support data collection and validation, seem to…

Physics preparation for primary school teachers has received attention only in recent decades. Research on science education provides useful guidelines, often disregarded. Several interrelated research questions must be addressed by field research, namely, (a) which physics subjects to teach in primary school and its relationships with other…

How do teachers relate to the "conflicts" that exist between scientific research findings and school institutional demands? Starting with a "provocative" statement by a primary school teacher, we interviewed eleven teachers asking them to express their opinions on this statement. Based on Brown's rereading of the four…

In the context of the distinction between normative and descriptive approaches to the relationship between science and religion, this article discusses the recent work of the sociologist Elaine Ecklund. It reviews four of her published outputs, summarising her data concerning the views of religious people and professional scientists, including…

School visits to research laboratories or facilities represent a unique way to bring students closer to science and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics careers. However, such visits can be very expensive for students and teachers, in terms of both time and money. In this paper, we present a possible alternative to on-site visits…

In the years 2015-2018, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and the Italian Ministry of Defense proposed the joint initiative "Space for Your Future. The ISS: Innovatio, Scientia, Sapientia" in partnership with the Italian Space Agency. It was a competition addressed to secondary school students and aimed at…

The need for an effective communication between scientific research and society is widely known to the broadest scientific community, and the sad times we are living in make it even clearer. At the same time, the need of establishing long-term structural connections between the worlds of research and that of education and scientific communication…

The role universities play in advancing COVID-specific knowledge and long-term management of this global crisis is largely unknown. In this comparative perspective study, we document the ways in which members from universities in the US, New Zealand, Italy, South Korea, and China engage in activities to respond to the pandemic. We frame this study…

Today, the term 'global' has become a pervasive description of universities that aim to alleviate their importance and reach. The global looks inherently big. By relating to a spherical shape it attributes size in two distinct ways: it signifies the comprehensive and extensive reach of a theme or issue as well as the spherical centrality of an…

This report presents data on peer-reviewed S&E journals and conference proceedings reflecting the rapidly expanding volume of research activity, the involvement and scientific capabilities different countries, and the expanding research ecosystem demonstrated through international collaborations. Publication output grew about 4% annually over…

This work investigates the research performance of foreign faculty in the Italian academic system. Incoming professors compose l.1% of total faculty across the sciences, although with variations by discipline. Their scientific performance measured over 2010-2014 is on average better than that of their Italian colleagues: the greatest difference is…

The U.S. R&D enterprise relies on businesses, federal and nonfederal governments, higher education institutions, and other nonprofit organizations. This report identifies trends in R&D performance and funding and compares them to those of the world's other major economies. The U.S. annual total of R&D has expanded steadily since 2010…

This article focuses on co-development technology transfer models. It offers an empirical analysis of a pioneer model applied in Italy: the proof-of-concept network (PoCN) applied by AREA Science Park in Trieste. Starting with a review of the literature, the authors identify the drivers that facilitate collaboration between the industrial and…

This letter documents some problems in Ancaiani et al. (2015). Namely the evaluation of concordance, based on Cohen's kappa, reported by Ancaiani et al. was not computed on the whole random sample of 9,199 articles, but on a subset of 7,597 articles. The kappas relative to the whole random sample were in the range 0.07-0.15, indicating an…

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several women in Italy, who gave pedagogy a new impulse. Among those women, two educationalists, Maria Montessori and Giuseppina Pizzigoni introduced new visions of the school by designing strategies that overcame the barriers to education. The first, with the structuring of a method, arose in Rome…