LIBRI DI LORELLA GIANNANDREA

The current socio-cultural context calls for a rethinking of teaching and assessment practices to turn assessment into a continuous and pervasive process that takes into account not only the final outcome but also the processes and reflections that led the student to achieve that result, with a view to continuous improvement. The main shift from the past is achieved with the adoption of the ‘assessment as learning’ paradigm, in which the student becomes an active player in the assessment and meta-reflection processes. Assessment is no longer perceived as a mere bureaucratic fulfillment of the teacher, but as a shared tool between students and teachers to build the learning path together, co-define goals, and make explicit expectations and critical issues. The design of authentic, open-ended, challenging tasks and the co-design and sharing of assessment rubrics, useful not only to ensure objectivity but also to guide the student in carrying out the task and implementing self-assessment, gains centrality. This paper describes a research-training pathway on assessment, conducted in 2022 and aimed at primary and secondary school teachers in the Marche Region, in Italy. The experience allowed teachers to approach the assessment as learning processes and to practice them in their own classrooms. The analysis of the data, collected through quantitative and qualitative tools and related to lower secondary school teachers, shows an increased focus on student activation in assessment dynamics and an increased awareness of the relevance of self-assessment processes. We also gained valuable feedback useful in guiding future research perspectives to improve the proposal’s sustainability.

The complexity of the class context changes knowledge that, today, experiments more and more the ambiguity between global and local. Knowledge seems to aim at the construction of nets of modal meanings. Even the posture of teachers and students change and feedback is one of the aspects that can mostly affect learning by fostering the acceptance of reciprocal worlds present in the class context. In this direction, also feedback seems to change and from an informative structure, as proposed by Gagné, feedback is acquiring a generative rationale, that is, a structure able to open different interpretative perspectives. In the present contribution modalities of feedback collection are described such as Mentimeter.com and Google.com forms being used in different courses at the department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism at the University of Macerata. Those tools were used to valorise the students’ informal and non formal knowledge and to define personalized trajectories. Feedback surely was the tool able to bridge the students’ and teachers’ experience and knowledge towards the construction of a net of meanings built in context.

What is trust and how new technologies are changing or affecting the concept of trust? This publication offers insights from researchers working in educational technology and distance education, collected in the frame of the European FP-7 Marie-Curie People project “Stimulators and inhibitors of a culture of trust in educational interactions assisted by modern information and communication technology”, and provides examples of implications of trust for successful learning experiences in distance education. The research goal is to understand how trust has changed or is changing: this is related not only to the modification of the meaning, but also indicators upon which people built their judgements.