This work reports the results of an exploratory survey conducted among educators and teachers of the educational sector 0-6 in the Municipality of Rome. Due to the lockdown caused by the spread of Covid 19, also in Rome, as in most part of the world, nursery and kindergarten operators have been forced to organize distance didactic, using digital tecnology, to maintain the relationship with children and their families. In order to understand the ways in which they organized distance learning and their opinions on the matter, an online questionnaire was created and submitted. Interesting findings emerged: all the respondents (n=318) put a lot of effort into the design of distance learning approaches even if almost all (except 5) declared that they had no training in the use of digital technologies for educational purposes and never had them previously adopted. L’uso delle tecnologie digitali per la costruzione di contesti educativi a distanza nel Nido e nella Scuola dell’Infanzia. Una indagine esplorativa. Questo lavoro riporta gli esiti di un’indagine esplorativa condotta tra gli educatori e i docenti del settore educativo 0-6 del Comune di Roma. A causa della chiusura determinata dalla diffusione del Covid 19, anche a Roma, come nel resto del mondo, le operatrici dei nidi e delle scuole d’infanzia hanno organizzato interventi educativi a distanza, utilizzando le tecnologie digitali, per mantenere la relazione con i bambini e le loro famiglie. Per conoscere le modalità, le tecnologie adottate e le loro opinioni in merito, è stato costruito un questionario distribuito online. Sono emerse questioni interessanti: tutte le rispondenti (n=318) hanno posto molto impegno nella progettazione di interventi didattici a distanza anche se la quasi totalità (eccetto 5) ha dichiarato di non avere alcuna formazione nell’uso delle tecnologie digitali a scopo educativo e di non averle mai adottate in precedenza.

The paper presents the results of early abandonment research conducted on students enrolled in 2013-2014 to degree courses of the Department of Education of “Roma Tre” University. The research was conducted with the use of a structured questionnaire and two standardized scales of measurement. The questionnaire, designed to detect the main traits of the university experience of respondents, it was administered using the CATI procedure universe of students who have left and to a representative sample of students who have continued their studies. The measurement scales concern the Self-efficacy perceived and the motivational profile of the students. They were administered by CAWI procedure to a self-selected sample of participants. The results emerging from the sectoral analysis of intervening variables in early drop out, which are compared with the findings in the literature specification, are then supplemented by a unique reference to the role that in the issue have the orientation deficits of students.

Il contributo presenta i risultati di una ricerca sull’abbandono precoce svolta sugli studenti immatricolati nel 2013-2014 ai corsi di laurea del Dipartimento di Scienze della Formazione della Universita Roma Tre. La ricerca e statacondotta con l’impiego di un questionario strutturato e di due scale di misurazione standardizzate. Il questionario, destinato a rilevare i tratti principali della esperienza universitaria degli intervistati e il giudizio che su di essa vieneespresso, e stato somministrato con procedura CATI all’universo degli studenti che hanno abbandonato e ad un campione rappresentativo degli studenti che hanno proseguito negli studi. Le scale di misurazione dell’autoefficacia percepita e dell’assetto motivazionale sono state somministrate con procedura CAWI ad un campione autoselezionato di studenti a cui era stato somministrato il questionario. I risultati che emergono dall’analisi settoriale delle variabili intervenienti nell’abbandono precoce, che vengono messi a confrontocon i riscontri presenti nella letteratura disciplinare, sono quindi integrati da un univoco richiamo al ruolo che nella questione riveste il deficit di orientamento formativo degli studenti.

In this paper we present the procedures and the results of an observational study carried out in the first half of AS 2015/2016 into two 3th classes of the Professional Institute of Palestrina (RM) and carried out as part of the PRIN Research (2013-2016). In one of the classes, considered as experimental class, the model of Didactic Modular Integrated Strategy (in Italian – SDiMI) was applied, in the other one, considered as the control class, the traditional teaching was continued to use. The SDiMI model, to which the teachers of the experimental class were formed, respect to the different elements that compose it, provides the application of the assessment as training function. In the time period of the teaching/evaluation intervention observation, two standardized questionnaires (in input and output), about the type of assessment used in class (Alkharusi, 2015; in Italian translation) were administered to teachers and students. Assessment tests (objective and semi-structured tests) were administered to the students. The analysis of the data showed a marked improvement in the experimental class, compared to the control class, of both the assessment activities used in training function, detected through the questionnaires, and the outcome of the students’ performance, especially in the reading tests and in the semistructured logical-mathematical test.

Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale: Adaptation and Validation in Italy According to Albert Bandura (1977, 1992, 1994, 1995), self-efficacy is «the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations». A person’s attitudes, abilities and cognitive skills comprise what is known as the self-system. This system plays a major role in how we perceive situations and how we behave in response to different situations. Self-efficacy is essential component of this self-system. In other words, self-efficacy is a person’s belief in his or her ability to succeed in a particular situation. In the international literature, self-efficacy is an important topic among psychologists and educators. As Bandura and other researchers have demonstrated, self-efficacy can have an impact on behavior and motivation. To assess teacher self-efficacy, we applied the Teacher Self-Efficacy Scale by Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk Hoy, 2001: for the Italian translation and adaptation we interviewed 200 teachers of primary and secondary schools (both genders represented). This scale is consistently found on three factors: «Efficacy for Student Engagement» (8 items), «Efficacy for Instructional Strategies» (8 items), and «Efficacy for Classroom Management» (8 items). The Italian adaptation confirms the relevance of the three factors and the statistical analysis shows the validity of the Italian version of the scale.

Digital Environments for the Development of Transversal Competences in University Education International studies show that university teaching is making increasing use of digital environments to integrate traditional teaching. In this paper we consider the contribution that can be made by online environments to develop students’ positive and proactive attitudes with respect to the academic curriculum in order to reduce student drop-out, encourage greater regularity in their academic career, develop transversal competences and promote student guidance. In particular, we have observed the online activities in academic year 2013/2014 carried on by students of General Didactics, a degree course in the Department of Educational Sciences of «Roma Tre» University. These activities include the realization of two online practical classes: completion of the QSA (Questionnaire for Learning Strategies); participation in a cooperative online learning exercise. In both experiences we analyzed the procedures and outcomes. We observed that, through the QSA, students reflected on their learning strategies and on the importance of planning their university commitments: a positive factor is the high percentage of students who took the exam successfully in the first session (approximately 68%). In addition, the questionnaire data clearly show that students found that group work helps to develop cognitive and meta-cognitive competences as well as relationship competences. In particular, we found that in the General Didactics examination the students who had experienced cooperative learning obtained higher grades, on average, than those who did not, and that the former group had less «sigma» compared to the latter.

This paper presents the procedures and the outcomes of collaborative activities and of peer tutoring carried out by the students in the teaching of “General Didactics”, held at the University of Roma Tre, in ay 2012/13.

In applied studies, researchers are often confronted with semicontinuous response models. These are models with a semicontinuous response variable, i.e. a continuous variable that has a lower bound, that we here consider to be zero, and such that a sizable fraction of the observations takes value on this boundary. Semicontinuous response models are common in pharmacovigilance, pharmacoepidemiological and pharmacoeconomic studies, where it can be sometimes useful to evaluate and monitor the doses of a certain drug substance consumed by the general population. The preponderant number of observations taking value zero corresponds to the part of the population which is not actually consuming the medicine, either because they do not need it or because, even if they need it, they are not taking it in a given interval of time. Another interesting field of application concerns goods or drugs consumption to be studied for economic or social purposes. We here explore the use of several asymmetric distributions to address the fact that the continuous part of the data distribution shows skewness in most cases. As an illustration, the proposal is applied to model alcohol expenditure in Italian households.

A generalization of the Probit model is presented, with the extended skew-normal cumulative distribution as a link function, which can be used for modelling a binary response variable in the presence of selectivity bias. The estimate of the parameters via ML is addressed, and inference on the parameters expressing the degree of selection is discussed. The assumption underlying the model is that the selection mechanism influences the unmeasured factors and does not affect the explanatory variables. When this assumption is violated, but other conditional independencies hold, then the model proposed here is derived. In particular, the instrumental variable formula still applies and the model results at the second stage of the estimating procedure.

In discrete choice models, the probability that the dependent variable will assume value 0 or 1 depends on a set of explanatory variables through a function F. In this paper we propose the class of skew Student t distribution as a function F in order to have a more flexible model that can simultaneously account for asymmetry and thick tails and such that probit and logit models can be considered as special cases. Two examples illustrate the performance of the proposed model.