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This paper aims at verifying the measurement capacity of a tool for teaching assessment at the University of Padova (Italy). The study is part of a project for improving academic educational innovations and the quality of academic teaching: an evaluative research approach thus allows reflection on useful teaching practices to share problems and find common solutions. This paper focuses on the contents and characteristics of statistical validity and reliability of the tool used, in an online survey to measure students' opinions of teaching (first-cycle, second-cycle, and single-cycle degree courses). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores the historical and educational context in Italy after the Second World War, focusing on the pedagogical and educational innovation of the Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa (Educational Cooperation Movement, MCE), founded to promote the techniques of Freinet, and in particular Bruno Ciari, teacher, politician and driving force behind national school renewal in Italy. Using printed sources and archives from the period, the paper looks at the social and pedagogical experiment developed by Bruno Ciari between 1966 and 1970 and promoted in the city of Bologna through «Pedagogic Februaries»; these involved a series of events, conferences and training initiatives, organised with the cooperation of key universities, targeting teachers and families in order to develop an innovative, shared school culture. From the egodocuments of a preschool teacher who worked with Bruno Ciari in the city of Bologna, we enter the heart of the renewal of teaching practices, highlighting the tormented process of change in the teaching profession, in favour of a school that would be a true alternative to the traditional model and open to the democratic demands of all society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, university-industry relationships have become an important subject due to the essential role played by technological progress in the economic development of countries. From a theoretical point of view, several studies have shown the close relationship between investments in research and innovative activities of universities and the economic growth of specific territories. Indeed, the strong linkages between universities and a country's production system encourage the process of technology transfer and the commercial use of the research results. For this reason, the European Union has implemented a series of measures to promote the adoption of research findings in the real economic and social context, strengthening the linkages between universities, industries and government. As a starting point for enhancing this link, specific mechanisms have been devised by universities. In particular, technology transfer offices (TTOs) have been created to stimulate and encourage the dissemination of the research outcomes, translate them into practise, and facilitate their interrelations with the other two agents of the innovation systems: industries and government. Within this context, the present paper aims to gain knowledge on the determinants of spin-off creation in Italy with special attention to the role played by university TTOs. Specifically, an econometric probability model has been built merging the extant literature into four distinct strands. The analysis, based on the NetVal indicators and primary data survey, has allowed us to assess the Italian experience at an aggregate and disaggregate level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a reflection on the relationships between university and production system based on the results analysis of 50 activities agreed by the DSA - Department for Architectural Science (University of Genoa) with companies, institutions and organizations in the period 2005-2011. The paper is divided in three parts. In the fi rst part "Innovation and Growth" the fifty conventions, the theoretical frameworks, the elements and criteria of the built dataset will be introduced supported by the presentation of the most remarkable case studies. The second part "Shaping data to bring out meanings" will show how a graphic visualization was drawn as a methodological tool of analysis and will underline the observations suggested and highlighted. The third part "Collaborative models - contemporary roles for designers" will draw the conclusions, inducted by the work on the dataset, of the role of design and the needs for designer training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to describe how the role of the University system has been redefined in Italy with the national regulation that has enhanced the interactions between the knowledge and the economy, in particular about the innovation in the didactics. It became compulsory for the University courses to take advice in advance from the local labour and professional market. The national regulation has been directed to the attenuation of problems as the transformation of the students' population, the coexistence between study and work and the gap between the students' skills and the needs of the labour market, raised since the increasing demand in higher education: in particular a standing advisory committee, "Comitato di Indirizzamento", is the new available instrument to monitor and redefine students' curricula as an up-to-day factor. Our empirical work describes the interaction between the new courses of study and the local labour and professional market, focusing on a dataset of courses of the eleven most populated Italian Universities, available online from the national database of the Ministry of University and Research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the use of interactive screens in early childhood is quite recent and often produces divergent results. The article presents the experience of the Municipality of Florence and the University of Florence aimed at designing and experimenting the perspective of Media Education in early childhood with the involvement of the municipal nursery schools and preschools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philanthropies and private foundations are increasingly acting as key nodes of the policy assemblages through which neoliberal and neomanagerialist policies are entering the field of education in Italy. In a country where public school 'ineffectiveness' and 'resistance to innovation' are taken for granted nowadays, policy philanthropists-entrepreneurs are attempting to lead the way in re-thinking education according to the new globalised economic imperatives. Starting from the ongoing 'evaluation turn' of the Italian education system, the article unravels the complexities of those processes of policy influence. The analysis addresses multiple foci: the emergence of new discourses of education reform and the networks of social interaction they are rooted in; the generative effects such discourses can have on producing new positions, subjectivities, opportunities; and the structural selectivities influencing education policy-making. The article highlights the first moves of a peculiar process of 'policy privatisation' whose main potential outcomes are both a process of education policy-making privatisation and a reculturing of education according to a new private-business ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]