LIBRI DI FRANCESCO AGRUSTI

1. Una ricerca internazionale per spiegare l’efficacia delle pratiche di formative assessment sulle capacità di problem solving degli studenti di scuola secondaria
2. Digital Literature Educational Competences for Teachers: Intercultural Inclusive Good-Practices for Second-Language Learning
3. Contrastare lo svantaggio socio-culturale nella scuola secondaria di primo grado: promuovere inclusione ed equità negli apprendimenti di base attraverso interventi di Ricerca-Formazione

La riflessione sugli stili di apprendimento che attraversa i vari saggi del volume è stata il punto di partenza per lo sviluppo del progetto DEAL – Digital Era Approaches to Learning/Un osservatorio sull’apprendimento nell’era digitale. L’auspicio è che la collaborazione tra esperti e la positiva contaminazione tra discipline educative possano convergere verso un punto d’arrivo comune: fornire alle giovani generazioni di allievi e studenti strumenti innovativi e diversificati, che contribuiscano ad aprire spiragli di speranza in un successo scolastico ed educativo equo e ampiamente distribuito.

The research reported in this article underlines the need to adopt a reflective attitude to the use of digital resources in teaching and learning. This relates to a growing body of research by different scholars in many countries. The present study underlines the need to adopt a reflective attitude to the use of digital resources in teaching and learning. The research starts from the assumption that students can develop their writing and critical thinking skills thanks to specific writing activities. Such activities regard the elaboration of short essays, both by hand and on computer keyboards, with the aim to highlight the difference in results. Within the paper, a specific assessment grid was outlined to evaluate students’ essays. Short essays written by students were produced in two different ways: by hand or keyboard. All data have been collected and analyzed to highlight the different results in skills development, according to the writing tool employed. From the analyses carried out and the results collected, handwritten short essays got higher scores than computer written texts: computer use in writing activities apparently reduces performances level in the majority of students taken into consideration.

This paper is part of a wider research project and focuses on the model adopted for evaluating the impact and effectiveness of online teaching and learning, enabling students to adopt a critical approach which could be extended to any online resource which they may use for their lifelong learning. Technology plays a fundamental role in everyone’s life and must be approached critically, especially by young people entering the labor market for the first time. The Laboratory for experimental pedagogy (Lps) based at the Department of Education – Roma Tre University has been working, since 2010, on research focusing on the enhancement of students’ critical thinking skills to foster the development and promotion of the critical use of technology in education. The present contribution describes how giving students the tools to carry out an evaluative analysis of the resource they are accessing can enable them develop their analytical and critical thinking skills. It can also help them gaining insight into the importance of "learning to learn" and independently evaluate the quality of online digital resources both as learners and future educators. Doing so it is possible to overcome "brief term instrumental characteristics" of tools and promote long term evaluation processes (Vertecchi, 2012).

Il progetto am-learning ha avuto come obiettivo principale la predisposizione di un ambiente adattivo per l’istruzione in rete, in grado di individualizzare il messaggio di apprendimento sulla base delle competenze linguistiche dei destinatari. Il volume riporta gli interventi presentati in occasione della conferenza internazionale organizzata a conclusione del progetto per discutere i risultati e le prospettive aperte in seguito al progetto stesso.

The purpose of the research project Nulla dies sine linea was to identify some trends in handwriting practices of primary school students over a period of about four months. The article presents the preliminary lexicometric and descriptive analyses carried out on the set of texts collected, that formed a corpus of approximately 1,807,836 characters, corresponding to 393,696 words. First, a description of the architecture of the lexicon (such as the corpus, graphemes, words, etc.) is provided, both from a general point of view, and from the specific aims of the research project (i.e. in relation to the background variables). Finally, major results are presented.