The paper critically discusses the neoliberal politics of knowledge and the soft normative regime that steers and directs the material condition of existence of educational research, starting from the case of Italy. The fundamental aspects, which regard the form, the ends (and indirectly the content) of a research, are to a substantial degree…

Nowadays, children and teenagers use technology products in an increasingly passive way. As simple consumers they cannot benefit from the opportunities of designing technology, which has a learning value. Educational Robotics (ER) programs are particularly effective in delivering contents of difficult disciplines: they can re-establish a balance…

Migration has become an important phenomenon in the contemporary world. In receiving countries, language policies have been put into place to offer migrants education in the national language, in order to give them tools to communicate with and to create a feeling of belonging to the local community. These policies claim to be integration…

Drawing inspiration from the research conducted in Italian schools involved in the reform process, the article proposes to investigate two visions in the research on Sociology of Education: one distal and the other proximal. The distal vision is offered by quantitative research nowadays supported by extensive public funding and framed as…

For quite some time, many EU and Italian Ministry of Education official documents have warmly suggested the introduction of the history and the philosophy of science in the teaching of science disciplines at school. Accordingly, there is a shared agreement between pedagogists and science historians about the efficacy of this approach towards an…

Acknowledging the complex relationships which the field of didactics of mathematics has with other research fields (e.g. mathematics, educational sciences, epistemology, history, psychology, semiotics, sociology, cognitive science), the authors analyze in this paper some cases of fruitful and some of failed dialogue between experts of the…

This study investigated conceptions of knowledge and beliefs among 242 Italian and 231 American college students. Perceptions of the nature and interrelation of knowledge and beliefs, and prevalent characterizations and sources of these two constructs were explored by qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Differences emerged between Italian…