QuaderniCIRD 20 (2020)

The purpose of this work is to present the situation of the teaching of Italian as a foreign language in Croatia. After discussing the teaching methods that can be adopted, this paper focuses on Croatian foreign language policy and on the role played by the Italian Communities in the promotion of Italian language and culture in Croatia. This paper is based on a fieldwork experience at the Italian Community in Zadar, which made it possible to reflect on the different strategies that could be adopted to improve the teaching of Italian as a foreign language process.

Analogic devices were, in the past, the best (and mostly unique) way to measure physical quantities of interest. With the great improvements in measuring technologies nowadays, it might happen that, students use in their experimental activities digital instruments without knowing how they work in terms of physical mechanisms, nor how they were developed, with the risk of losing the information about device-environment interactions. In our experience, starting from the functioning mechanism of an ancient galvanometer, we prepared a teaching course in a laboratory context, to improve learning on stationary currents in a secondary school. The good results obtained and discussed in a Bachelor thesis at the University of Trieste, suggests that this kind of approach could be extended to other ancient measuring instruments to teach students how physics has developed, thanks to the design and the use of smart instruments.

Mathematical skills are essential to master everyday activities properly, make everyone aware of his/her personal and professional choices and effectively exercise citizenship in a numerate society. For these reasons, it is fundamental to study and describe the factors that can promote or hinder the learning process at the base of this discipline. Literature on the topic has extensively investigated the cognitive abilities that prompt math learning (e.g., intelligence, memory, processing speed) and, more recently, researchers have explored the contribution of the emotional factors (e.g., general or specific anxiety) on math performance. In this paper we will present an update review of the effects of math anxiety on math learning and present a bio-psycho-social model that could help to better understand the possible etiology of this condition. This developmental and dynamic approach seem to be the most suitable for studying and treating math anxiety.