Teachers’, school staff’s and parents’ efficacy beliefs as determinants of attitudes toward school

Self- and collective efficacy beliefs were examined as correlates of attitudes toward school of teachers, school staff, and parents. 726 teachers, 387 staff members, and 1994 parents from 18 junior high schools in Milan and Rome, Italy, were administered questionnaires assessing self-efficacy beliefs, perceptions about colleagues’ bahavior, collective efficacy beliefs, affective commitment and job satisfaction of teachers and school staff and parents satisfaction with school. Path analyses corroborated a conceptual model in which self- and collective efficacy beliefs represent, respectively, the distal and proximal determinants of affective commitment and job satisfaction for teachers and staff and of satisfaction with school for parents. Perceptions that teachers, staff and parents hold about the behavior of their colleagues largely mediated the links between self- and collective efficacy beliefs. collective efficacy beliefs, in turn, largely mediated the influence that self-efficacy beliefs and perceptions of school constituencies’ behaviors exert on attitudes toward school of teachers, staff and parents.     

La géométrie projective à l'école

Sans résuméTravail effectué dans le cadre du groupe de recherche en didactique de la mathématique du Conseil National des Recherches.     

Where is my attention? Children’s metaknowledge expressed through drawings

The aim of the present research is to assess the developmental pattern of the metacognitive knowledge of attention in Italian primary school students. Data were collected from 95 pupils divided into two age groups: the first (6–8 years) and second primary school cycles (8–10 years). The children were asked to perform two specific thematic drawings on attention vs inattention in the school context. The drawings were coded on the basis of the Children’s Awareness of Attention through Drawing, consisting of five scales which explore the behavioural, pragmatic, cognitive, emotional and social awareness of attention. The analysis of the thematic drawings reveals that from the early years of primary school, children are aware of some components of attention: behavioural awareness, pragmatic awareness and social awareness. Other components are instead acquired as of the age of eight.     

Influence of verb and noun bases on reading aloud derived nouns: evidence from children with good and poor reading skills

Several studies on children and adults with and without linguistic impairment have reported differences between verb and noun processing. The present study assessed whether noun and verb bases affect differently children’s reading of derived words. Thirty-six Italian good readers and 18 poor readers, all 4th or 5th graders, were asked to read aloud nouns derived from either a noun base (e.g., artista, artist) or a verb base (e.g., punizione, punishment). Word and base frequency affected latencies only for deverbal nouns, while an effect of word length emerged for denominal nouns and an inhibitory effect of suffix length was found for both types of stimuli. A high base frequency and a high whole-word frequency both led to higher levels of accuracy. Verb bases led to higher error rates than noun bases. Poor readers, although slower and less accurate than good readers, showed a pattern of results similar to that of typically developing readers. Data confirm that in 4th and 5th graders morphological decomposition may affect reading aloud of long complex words, and that the grammatical class of the base can modulate this effect.     

The Role of Historical-Philosophical Controversies in Teaching Sciences: The Debate Between Biot and Ampère

This paper evaluates the viability of using controversies in teaching. An educational project has been elaborated in which some historical-philosophical clashes were introduced into the classical syllabus of physics. The historical-philosophical controversy dealt with here, took place between the French physicists Biot and Ampère in the 19th century and referred to distinct interpretations of the Oersted experiment. This controversy was inserted into the syllabus of the 12th grade of a Brazilian secondary school.