LIBRI DI VALERIA DAMIANI

The QATEK project is aimed at developing a quality oriented system of initial teacher education to increase teachers’ professionalism in Kosovo. This study aims to present and delve into one of the main outputs of the project, namely the course syllabus review process, carried out at partner universities in Kosovo based on the policy document developed in the project. Three focus groups were carried out with faculty members and university students in October 2023. The findings of the study illuminate the transformative impact of elevating professionalism through the course syllabus revision process within teacher education. The study underscores the importance of adopting a lifelong learning perspective for teachers’ professional development, positioning the syllabus revision process as a continuous and adaptive journey.

This paper aims at expanding some findings of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS 2016), analysing the associations between European immigrant and non-immigrant students’ civic knowledge, perceptions of good citizenship, and expected civic engagement (students’ expected participation in legal/illegal activities and in electoral/political participation) using structural equation modelling. Descriptive analyses are also presented to investigate the extent to which immigrant students’ perceptions of different aspects of citizenship and their expected civic engagement differ from their native-born counterparts. Result show that immigrant adolescents who took part in the survey seem to prefer a type of engagement that does not trust the traditional methods related to electoral participation, but is willing to be committed to other forms of participation, either in political or legal activities, or even in illegal protests. The structural equation model highlighted no difference in the relation between immigrant and non-immigrant students’ perceptions of citizenship and their civic engagement, stressing the relevance that formal education plays in fostering students’ civic engagement during adulthood.

Global Citizenship Education (Gce) aims at developing students’ awareness on global issues and engagement in actions for change at local and global level. Its introduction into classroom practice raises some questions on the knowledge and skills necessary to reach Gce goals in teaching and learning contexts. This article aims at analyzing students’ understanding of global issues, tackled during a learning unit devoted to Gce, through the analysis of three different types of written compositions. After highlighting some critical elements in students’ writing, the study stresses the difficulty in finding evidences of their learning through written tasks. Finally, the article shows the implications in applying the general theoretical models for Gce in a teaching and learning perspective, stressing the need to enhance students’ knowledge and skills for understanding of and writing about complex issues related to contemporary world.

Reading a mathematical problem can be often challenging for students. To be successful, they need to understand the words, transposing their meaning on an abstract level, to identify the relations stated in the problem and the task requested. Even if the meaning of the words is known, the case can be given that the student cannot grab the global meaning, nor inferring useful implications to solve the problem. This article offers an overview on reading comprehension issues linked to mathematical texts, and then proposes a set of common mistakes made by young readers, emerged in a first exploratory field experience carried out with grade 7 students. Given that learning activities were carried out on the Pythagorean Theorem, specific attention was devoted to the transposition of words into geometrical figures.

It is widely recognized that vocabulary is closely tied to reading comprehension, and correlations between these two constructs, even if differently defined across studies, vary between .6 and .8. But correlation is not a causal relationship, and does not provide enough basis for a comprehensive conceptual explanation. Reversing the problem, it is still highly controversial whether specific interventions on vocabulary instruction can massively influence reading comprehension, and this particularly in adult learners, indicating that a lot remains to be investigated in the field of vocabulary knowledge transfer to other components of language proficiency. Recent studies showed that the weak link for understanding this apparent gap lies probably in the way vocabulary is assessed. This article shows the results of a two-year research project aimed at assessing future teachers’ vocabulary related to school everyday life issues, focussing both on language for specific purposes and on general language. In particular, different typologies of reading comprehension tests, of vocabulary tests (receptive and productive), on paper and pencil and on computer-based administrations, were adopted and compared.