Why does still talking about lifelong guidance make sense? 

Speranzina Ferraro 

This paper begins with an analysis of social and economic change that still runs through the globalized world and then highlights the persistent problems of the school today to pursue its traditional mission, that is educating young people, providing them with the training necessary for successful integration into society and in the world of work. The guidance process is analyzed starting from the reasons why it, in its educational dimension, can become the optimal strategy to prepare people to live in complexity and to grasp the meaning of life, provided they invest in teachers and their integral formation.

IMPROVE project. A proposal for an actual learning continuity 

Lidia Bertuggia, Silvana Romio, Gruppo di Progetto IMPROVE

The improve project focused on two main issues coming out from the self-evaluation document: Continuity and orientation and Citizen’s key skills. The project shed light on the essential role of interaction between teachers of different types of schools to guarantee the learning continuity. It allowed identifying the skills indicators and educational needs to ensure a peaceful transit through the scholar path. It detected also the need of a more applicative and laboratory teaching, fostering the use of icts among teachers and interactive and practice didactics, that put first a problem solving approach as well as the importance of highlighting the complex role and work of teachers by the government and society.

Con.D.Or. Project. An orientation course from primary school to the second grade secondary school

Gianluca Gualdi, Elena Carelli, Alice Lizzori, Maria Assunta Zanetti

Con.D.Or. Project (Guidance Council) was founded at the University of Pavia with a guidance questionnaire in response to the need of some schools in Pavia to have a tool that would provide students with a guidance council, according to their attitudes and skills for the third year of lower secondary school. Over the years around Con.D.Or. and its guidance profile, it has developed a path accompanying the choice of secondary school. Furthermore, laboratories were created to allow students to think more about themselves and their abilities, and a series of questionnaires covering education from primary school to the first two years of lower secondary school until the final two years of secondary school. The aim of the work is to present the birth and development of this longitudinal guidance project.

Guarantee equal opportunities for foreign students in school choices 

Diego Boerchi

Foreign students attending Italian schools tend to prefer more vocational training courses than high schools. This phenomenon, which takes the name of “educational segregation”, can be partly countered through targeted interventions aimed at supporting scholastic choices. The article describes a specific intervention model, realised and tested within a project that involved 68 schools and 676 students. The comparison with a control group of 724 students with equal characteristics has shown its effectiveness in contrasting the phenomenon both about the distribution of choices relating to high school and the rejection rate in second or third grade.

Preventing and contrasting school bullying. Findings from the “Peer Help Campania” program 

Serena Aquilar, Paola Alicandro, Grazia De Angelis, Marina De Blasio, Concetta Esposito, Maria Concetta Miranda, Valentina Rea, Dario Bacchini

This paper aims to illustrate the “Peer Help Campania” project and to evaluate its effectiveness in terms of reducing bullying, cyberbullying and homophobic bullying. The Project utilized a peer education approach and involved 1288 students (m age=15; SD=.73) from eight schools in Campania. To evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, the responses of the experimental group (eg) were compared to those of the control group (cg), before and after the intervention. The results support the effectiveness of the intervention: homophobic victimization and homophobic bullying decreased in the eg and remained stable in the cg; traditional victimization, traditional bullying and cyberbullying remained stable in the eg and increased in the cg, cybervictimization decreased in the eg and increased in the cg. These results support the positive value of peer education in fighting bullying.

Flipped Classroom and traditional teaching. A study in a primary school 

Letizia Lazzaretti, Alessia Cadamuro, Gian Antonio Di Bernardo, Chiara Pecini

The research involved 41 4th grade children from nine to ten years old. The experimental group (11 M, 10 F) studied History through the Flipped Classroom (fc), while the control one (8 M, 12 F) followed the traditional approach. Objectives: evaluate the fc’s effect on learning and it’s relation with metacognition and creativity. Instruments: Italian version of the Children’s Perceived Use of Self-Regulated Learning Inventory, a questionnaire on pupils’ metacognition perceived by the teachers, the creativity test Unusual Uses Test and a test about knowledge. The results show that the relationship between the fc and learning is moderated by metacognition. The fc was found to be effective in improving learning especially for pupils with low metacognition. Thus, it seems that children with poor metacognition are able to make up for their shortcomings thanks to fc.

Promoting school autonomy through the use of social network 

Francesca Derba, Teresa Calabretta, Francesca Cavallini

The project was planned with the aim of promoting autonomy and motivation to study in two adolescent students, through the use of social networks. The project, based on experimental evidence, was organized to provide an initial and a final evaluation of some variables considered relevant. Study and organization behaviour and scores at amos Test Learning (De Beni et al., 2014); results on the scale of tma’s school autonomy (Bracken, 2003) were observed. The intervention provided the implementation of a goal setting procedure associated with a decrease in feedback, through the use of a social network. The results suggest that the procedure has been effective in increasing the spontaneous peer feedback output and organizational management of the study and tasks.

Training for psychology students. Public Posting and Informative Feedback 

Iris Pelizzoni, Beatrice Lombardi, Maria Chiara Sacchetti, Chiara Marchi, Francesca Cavallini

The university path of psychology students includes a post-graduate training period whose objectives are specifically defined by the Italian National Council of the Order of Psychologists (cnop). The strategies most effective in the literature concern training that combines use of public posting and informational feedback (Duhon et al., 2008; Tosolin, Gatti, & Algarotti, 2008), that is the graphic display of the results obtained through the use of graphics, tables or posters, in places that are easily visible to the others. The results suggest that the training was effective to increasing the desired behaviors, in the work context considered and to achieve of the objectives defined, with the post-graduate trainees and with students of Master in Applied Behavior Analysis (University of Parma) who participated in the study.