School adjustment is an important factor in children's, and research attributes an important role to the quality of the teacher-student relationship in predicting more favourable school adjustment. The purpose of this study is to expand our knowledge of the relationship between teacher-student relationship quality and school adjustment (academic…

A close student-teacher relationship is a protective factor for students' psychological well-being, and it is associated with students' internalizing and externalizing symptoms, but the mechanism underlying this association is unclear. To address this issue, this study investigated the role of children's hope in the relationship between teachers'…

The present research aims to extend findings from a recent study in which a large sample of primary and secondary school pupils was asked to choose a hypothetical classmate they would invite to share five different activities. Results demonstrated that a visible disability represents a barrier for social participation and involvement. In the…

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to reflect on and process the sounds of spoken language and to conduct mental operations on the units that represent them, that is, phonemes. This study intended to examine the descriptive and psychometric properties of the phonemic awareness of schoolers test assessment (PASTA), a new tool that assesses…

In the current study, we investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge in the relation between working memory (WM) and reading comprehension, in a sample of 55 typically developing 8-year-old Italian children. The role of WM in comprehension is well-established, as both involve similar processes for successful task performance (i.e., active…

The role of children's receptive vocabulary knowledge in word and nonword reading (decoding) in an orthographically transparent language is debated. Moreover, we have little understanding of how the role of vocabulary might differ between monolingual children and bilingual children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children…

The paper contains progress reports supported by data about two short activities aimed at introducing physics themes in primary school. The first is a formal storytelling intervention named "Mommy Comet" carried out in first- and fifth-grade classes and concerning motion in the absence of forces in the Solar System broad context. The…

The relationships between visuo-spatial abilities and geometry performances in school-aged children were examined. A battery of tests assessing non-verbal reasoning, visuo-spatial mental imagery, and academic achievement in geometry (i.e., geometric knowledge and geometric problem-solving competencies) was presented to 162 8-9.5-year-old pupils…

Reciprocal teaching is one of the most successfully implemented cooperative learning practices, yet many aspects of the process it follows are still unclear. The authors' aim was two-fold: To analyze whether reciprocal teaching activates diversity in discourse moves, communicative functions, and interaction sequences; and to determine whether…

Whereas some evidence exists that math anxiety may interfere with math performance from the very beginning of primary school, no study to date has attempted to investigate whether math anxiety may also interfere with early math learning (i.e., the encoding of new math knowledge) and not only with recalling already mastered contents in test…

Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…

Background: Attitudes of classmates has been considered as one of the major problems in inclusive education, negatively influencing the participation of students with disability in school contexts. The goal of this study was to examine Italian typically developing children's attitudes towards their peers with disabilities. Method: In a sample of…

According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional…

Educators and several national standards highlight the role that problem solving should play in students' mathematics education: problem solving is recognized as one of the most significant activities of doing mathematics. From the research point of view, nowadays, it is well established that cognitive and affective factors come into play in…

The current research was aimed mainly at exploring the reliability of a short-screening tool developed to self-evaluate visuospatial abilities in children. We presented 290 Italian third, fourth, and fifth graders with the 16-item Shortened Visuospatial questionnaire and several objective measures of intellectual efficiency, such as Raven's…