The surge of Mobile Virtual Reality (VR) applications is getting growing attention among researchers and practitioners. The recent literature demonstrates its benefits when used for education purposes, since virtual immersion yields promising results for learning. Leveraging this trend, within the so called “digital didactics”, the need to gauge VR’s effectiveness in the didactic field has become paramount; so far, a method to connect traditional evaluation strategies to novel VR-based learning is still broadly missing. This paper investigates the problem of quantifying the learning outcomes and proposes a new didactic evaluation method for the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) learning. This research, conducted in a higher education institute, proposes three new Key Performance Indicators, referring to Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (RBT) : Mnemonic (M) , Transversal (T) , and Disciplinary (D) . A questionnaire was administered by the same teacher who holds the course, to evaluate how well the application communicated information. The participants have been subdivided into two groups with the same knowledge base. The first group (1ACAT) that represents the “VR group” used the app at home to deepen their subject studies; while the second group (1AGR) that represents the “control group” consulted and studied the app only before the test. The results have demonstrated that the “control group” has a greater ability to support purely mnemonic topics (1ACAT 46.9%, 1AGR 53.1%), such as dates and simple definitions. The skills reached by the “VR group” attest to both transveral (1ACAT 52.9%, 1AGR 47.1%) and disciplinary (1ACAT 52.5%, 1AGR 47.5%) knowledge. These results validate the use of VR in teaching, demonstrating both experiential value and student involvement, but even confirming the compensatory function of VR if compared with the irreplaceable role of teachers in guiding learners to learn.

In today’s world, technology and digital media are no longer separate, “other” than “natural” human and social life. Technology has become pervasive, transparent, reaching a “stable” form, no longer revolutionary. A new concept, “the post-digital,” is emerging and gradually taking hold in a wide range of fields. The resulting complexities call for overcoming the binary and hierarchical approach between theory and practice by rethinking traditional teaching patterns and remediating knowledge. Maker Education is moving in this direction. It is considered a technology-based extension of activism, developing STEAM and 21st-century skills. Its main exponents believe that it can “disrupt” or transform traditional educational methods. The Maker Movement, indeed, overlaps with the natural inclinations of children and the power of learning by doing. This contribution presents an ongoing research project that aims to outline a proposal for integrating this approach into the primary and lower secondary school curriculum. We detected its impact on students’ school self-efficacy and attitude toward STEM and 21st-century skills. The results collected in the first part of the project look promising. The data underline the pupils’ interest in STEM subjects and the improvement of their organizational and interpersonal skills.

Information about the paper titled "ASSESSMENT AS LEARNING: TRANSFORMING PRACTICES WITH SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS" at IATED Digital Library

This article reports on the results of a teacher training course in which 41 teachers, working together with three university researchers, experienced a different way to engage in meaningful teaching and learning activities in design, coding and robotics. The course was run in an Italian school during the lock-down period of the Covid-19 pandemics. The training path had the objective to make the participants work differently, acting both as researchers and as teachers in training. The research reported in this article examined if and how an online teacher training course could act as a third space between school and academic cultures to achieve a negotiation of pedagogical practices. Findings from the study, collected through pre-post questionnaires and open-ended discussions, highlight an improvement in knowledge related to coding and robotics. Moreover, during the course, teachers experienced a new approach to space-time dimensions, first-hand experimentation and a collaborative approach, leading to greater perceived confidence in their skills and competences.