This research was carried out to determine the perceptions of schools of students studying in five European Union countries (Spain, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania) and the candidate country Turkey. In the study, the data were obtained through the student opinion form created by the researchers and analyzed by content analysis. In the study, it…

Purpose: This paper aims to attempt to provide an overview of the valuable scientific contribution on learning organization in social science from the perspectives of Professor Silvia Gherardi and discusses the evolution of Silvia's work over her long career. Design/methodology/approach: With the collaboration of this leading scholar, Professor…

The ever-increasing presence of immigrants in Italian schools make these contexts important for the study of young peoples' attitudes towards those who are new to a country. We analysed the metaphors regarding immigrants produced by a sample of 840 eighth-grade students. The results of a content analysis showed nine complex attitudes referring to…

This paper investigates how features of teaching practice may foster appropriation: learning that involves both deep conceptual understanding and transforming scientific discourse in a way that is significant for oneself. Data were drawn from classroom discussions during a unit on thermodynamics that took place in a high school in Italy. We…

The main purpose of the present research is examining the Turkish and Italian students' perceptions of the concept of "mathematics teacher" through metaphors. The study group of the research consists of 167 Turkish and 112 Italian students, the total of 279 students in the same age group. Students were asked to use another concept…

This is a description of the conceptual foundations used for designing a novel learning environment for mechanics implemented as an "Industrial Educational Laboratory"--called Fisica in Moto (FiM)--at the Ducati Foundation in Bologna. In this paper, we will describe the motivation for and design of the conceptual approach to mechanics…

This work-in progress research design focuses on the development process of a "Training Perspectives Questionnaire" to investigate how trainers and consultants conceive training and to promote awareness about themselves as trainers. The study was developed within the project "Soft Skills: Aware, Competent and Competitive", led…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

We investigated the extent to which the literal meanings of the words forming literally plausible idioms (e.g., "break the ice") are semantically composed and how the idiomatic meaning is integrated in the unfolding sentence representation. Participants read ambiguous idiom strings embedded in highly predictable, literal, and idiomatic…

In the labour market women's jobs have frequently been conceptually and literally tied to housework and hence thought of as unskilled and therefore undervalued. Although academic institutions have undergone changes, the fact that women still carry the main responsibility for domestic and caring tasks continues to follow them into the academic work…

Medical students often face problems in using and understanding metaphors when communicating with a patient or reading a scientific paper. These figures of speech constitute an interpretative problem and students need key strategies to facilitate metaphor comprehension and disambiguation of meaning. This article examines how medical students'…

This study analyses the case of a gifted child (9;6 year) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who had a particularly high verbal IQ (146) and a specific cognitive, linguistic, and metalinguistic profile. A description of some salient behavioral characteristics of the child is provided. A metalinguistic ability test assessing metagrammatical,…

This article presents case studies on metaphor comprehension in two boys with high-functioning autistic spectrum disorder, aged 9;1 (9 years, 1 month) and 8;11. The participants were assessed twice, before and after an intervention program aimed at improving their social skills. The focus of the article is on the specific patterns exhibited by…