WHICH ROLE FOR PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS IN HIGHER EDUCATION? FOCUS ON QUALITY ASSURANCE IN ITALY

This article explores the role of voluntary quality assessments in higher education, underscoring their main features and potentialities, and showing that basic principles and guidelines can be customised in different countries or single institutions. The article extensively presents an assessment project developed at the University of Siena, the first integrated assessment of teaching and research quality of a whole university carried out in Italy. The article clearly highlights the relevance of quality assurance and performance measurement systems and the behavioural and organisational impacts they may have.     

Controlled evaluation of a multimodal system to improve oral presentation skills in a real learning setting

Developing oral presentation skills requires both practice and expert feedback. Several systems have been developed during the last 20 years to provide ample practice opportunities and automated feedback for novice presenters. However, a comprehensive literature review discovered that none of those systems have been adequately evaluated in real learning settings. This work is the first randomised controlled evaluation of the impact that one of these systems has in developing oral presentation skills during a real semester-long learning activity with 180 students. The main findings are that (1) the development of different dimensions of the oral presentations are not affected equally by the automated feedback and (2) there is a small but statistically significant effect of the use of the tool when a subsequent presentation is evaluated by a human expert.     

NEET: A Phenomenom Yet to Be Explored

Who are the NEET? How much do we know about this? What do institutions and the media know about them? How different definitions could get to shared policies? This paper tries to provide an initial overview of the situation regarding the NEET, through an analysis of the emerging international literature on the subject. Different definitions across nations are analyzed in order to reflect on the cultural differences and economics-work policies, in order to then analyze more in deep the Italian situation. In Italy, the phenomenon is still little known in society and, often, not recognized by the acronym NEET, with the many variables that define it, despite statistics showing a rise in numbers (26 % of the total population for the age group considered).     

Investigating the role of a Web-based tool to promote collective knowledge in medical communities

The paper reports a case study where a relatively lightweight technology in the form of a Web-based questionnaire was used to support members of a real community of professionals in externalizing and sharing their good practices and achieving a better awareness of and agreement on topics of common interest. We focused on an important medical association that counts more 1000 doctors all around the world as its members. In particular, we report how this association used the occasion of the on-line survey enabled by our technology to increase the awareness of its members about the actual heterogeneity of preferences existing in their daily clinical practice, and to trigger discussion toward a better consensus on best practices, appropriate indications, and treatments of choice for their profession and practice. We also report the result of a post-hoc evaluation of the Web-based technology employed, and draw some implications for the better design of this kind of tool in order to collect and share collective knowledge in specific professional domains.     

Using a Conceptual Understanding and Procedural Fluency Heuristic to Target Math Interventions with Students in Early Elementary

The study examined the use of a conceptual and procedural framework for identifying math deficits and delivering appropriate interventions. Participants were two first‐grade students and one third‐grade student, who were identified as struggling with the grade‐appropriate content in math. The first‐grade students focused on addition and the third‐grade student focused on multiplication. Each student's conceptual understanding was assessed, and students who lacked conceptual understanding received an intervention that addressed underlying concepts. Students with acceptable understanding of the underlying concepts received an intervention that focused on the procedure. The study used a single‐case, multiple‐baseline design, but the contra‐indicated intervention was administered for the first 2 weeks following baseline, with the prescribed intervention for the final 2 weeks. Each student showed more growth during the prescribed intervention phase when compared to the contra‐indicated phase.     

Microtextural and microchemical studies of hydraulic ancient mortars: Two analytical approaches to understand pre-industrial technology processes

Two different analytical approaches have been taken into account to investigate the role of Si-rich phases in enhance hydraulic reactions of bedding mortar mixtures from San Lorenzo Church in Milan (Northern Italy) and from the Medicean Aqueduct in Pisa (Central Italy). In the first case, mortars show clear hydraulic type reactions in the form of coronal layers between the reacting additive and the binder mass. In the second one, the hydraulic reactions do not develop visible mineral phases and processes have been inferred from chemical, mineralogical analyses and mass balance calculation. The microstructural studies not always are sufficient to understand the complex dynamics of reaction attained during pre-industrial manufacturing processing of mortars and related binders. In fact, if the reacting raw materials are fine-grained and/or have remarkable chemical reactivity, no relicts are preserved by mortar microtextures.     

Cognitive styles,abilities, and aptitudes: Are they dependent or independent?

An important question that must be answered is whether cognitive styles, abilities, and aptitudes provide complementary or redundant information regarding students' characteristics. Measures of 6 styles, 6 abilities, and 12 aptitudes were administered to 201 Navy recruits. Relationships among all cognitive attributes and between sets of styles and abilities as well as styles and aptitudes were examined by computing product-moment correlations and two canonical analyses. A principal-factor analysis and varimax rotation were also computed for all 24 characteristics. The results indicated that many styles are significantly related to abilities and aptitudes. However, the amount of shared variance between styles and abilities or aptitudes is small. Three significant factors were extracted (i.e., technical aptitude, verbal ability, and general problem solving) which underlie much of the variability of these cognitive characteristics. The data demonstrated (1) the relative dependence of most cognitive styles with abilities and aptitudes inherent to general problem solving, and (2) the relative independence of some cognitive styles from technical aptitude and verbal ability dimensions.     

实际塑性铰链位置对延性框架行为的影响

研究目的：研究方法：通过有限元分析和极限分析,研究了在纵向和横向载荷下钢框架的最大负荷和坍塌模式,并考虑了塑性铰链住轴向力和弯曲力矩的作用下住实际旋转时的运动学。在垂直和水平方向载荷共存的情况下,基于轴向力和弯曲力矩的交互作用,研究延性框架的极限载荷和坍塌模式对产生于塑性铰链的真实运动学的敏感性。通过两个基本的案例和通过成功地评估非线性有限元分析和直接实施的极限分析步骤,并利用MATHEMATICA,揭示了其敏感性。 在标准规程的框架下,即使在最简单的案例中,极限分析的主要结果也会考虑在坍塌时的运动学,这与设计和加固的目的都是相关的。如果没有对所有的结构元件的轴向力和弯曲力矩的交互作用进行合理的计算,塑性铰链的定位计算可能得出不正确的坍塌机理和误导性的安全系数。就具体方面而言,本文清楚地表明,在设计新的结构或者为现有结构进行加固时,即使是使用看起来已经非常完备的经典步骤,也必须非常小心。本文的模型可以为处理规程设计的执业工程师和标准化委员会提供参考。     

The impact of public funding on science valorisation: an analysis of the ERC Proof-of-Concept Programme

Governments and public agencies are increasingly keen to support the translation of scientific discoveries into commercial and societal applications through science valorisation funding, as a way to enhance progress and inclusive growth. In this paper, we use grant-level data from the European Research Council Proof-of-Concept (PoC) programme, in order to assess the impact of public funding on a broad set of science valorisation outcomes, including licensing, spinoff formation, R&D collaborations, consulting and access to follow-on funding. We employ an instrumental variable approach to compare the valorisation outcomes of projects that obtained an ERC PoC grant to a group of projects that applied to the PoC scheme but were not funded. We find that the programme was effective in fostering the early valorisation of scientific discoveries by all measures of success that we employed. Overall, thus, our findings speak in favour of this type of policy instrument as a catalyst to accelerate the transition of scientific breakthroughs towards practical applications.