Threat of grade retention, remedial education and student achievement: Evidence from upper secondary schools in Italy

We use a reform that was recently implemented in Italy to investigate the effects on academic achievement of more stringent requirements for the admission to the next grade at upper secondary school. We study how such effects are mediated by changes in family and school inputs, and in the student commitment to learn all school subjects including those usually considered as marginal components of the curriculum. Geographical discontinuities in the implementation of the reform allow us to set out the comparison of similar students undergoing alternative progression rules, and to shed light on whether, and to what extent, the reform has worked as a tool to improve short-term achievement gains. We document differential effects across curricular tracks, picturing at best - depending on the data employed - a marginal improvement for students in academic schools. We instead find sharp negative effects of the reform in technical and vocational schools, where the students enrolled come from less privileged backgrounds. These findings are accompanied by a substantial increase in the number of activities out of the normal school hours in technical and vocational schools, but not in academic schools. Also, we find that the reform has left unchanged the various family inputs that we consider, and that parents did not provide extra economic support to students facing an increased threat of grade retention. However, in contrast with the documented effects on achievement, we find that schools reacted to the additional administrative burdens and costs imposed by the reform by admitting more students to the next grade. We thus conclude that the reform has had a negative effect on motivation and engagement of the most struggling students, thus exacerbating existing inequalities

Nudging gender desegregation: a field experiment on the causal effect of information barriers on gender inequalities in higher education

In this article, we propose and test a novel explanation for gender segregation in Higher Education that focuses on the misperceptions of economic returns to fields of study. We frame this explanation within the literature emphasizing the role of gender-stereotypical preferences and occupational plans, and we argue that counselling activities in school can play a crucial role in either reinforcing or countering the weight of these expressive mechanisms relative to more instrumental considerations involving occupational prospects of different fields. In particular, we suggest that the availability of reliable, ready-to-use information on these prospects enhances the probability that students, particularly females, opt for more rewarding fields. To test this argument, we present the results of a field experiment conducted in Italy that confronted high school seniors with detailed information concerning returns to tertiary education and field of study differentials, and we assess how girls and boys reacted to this counselling intervention

Gender, information barriers and fields of study choice: a field experiment

In this article we propose and test a novel explanation for the segregation of wom-en in less rewarding fields of study in tertiary education that focuses on the lack of knowledge of the profitability of different fields, a mechanism that has arguably received limited attention in previous research. We frame this explanation in the context of research that emphasizes the role of gender-stereotypical curricular preferences and occupational plans for gender differences across fields, and we argue that school counseling can play a crucial role in either reinforcing or counter-ing these mechanisms by providing students with transparent information about returns to educational investments. To test this hypothesis we carried out a field experiment which confronted a random sample of over 9000 Italian high school seniors with detailed information concerning the profitability of fields of study and the vocational alternatives to college. Contrary to the claim that girls are less ca-reer-oriented than boys, we found that the former were much more reactive to this information initiative. Indeed, this intervention substantially improved the occupa-tional prospects of the girls by reducing their overrepresentation in weak fields and by enhancing their participation in vocational HE as an alternative to leaving the educational system after high school graduation. These findings support the hy-pothesis that information barriers fuel gender inequality in educational choices and suggest that light-touch, cost-effective counseling interventions that provide all students with the same information can have significant gender-equalizing effects

Dual-earner and dual-career couples in contemporary Italy

'Auf der Grundlage eines nationalen longitudinalen Datensatzes analysiert der Beitrag die Bedingungen, die das Entstehen von Zweiverdiener-Haushalten und berufstätigen Ehepartnern in Italien begünstigen, d.h. in einem Land, das durch eine relativ geringe Partizipation von Frauen am Berufsleben und geringe Mobilität zwischen den Generationen gekennzeichnet ist. Als berufstätige Ehepartner werden auch alle Paare gefasst, bei denen beide Ehepartner höheren Berufsklassen nach der Klassifizierung von Erikson und Goldthorpe angehören. Mittels EHA und Cross-Lag-Modellen haben wir untersucht, wie die Bildung von Frauen und ihre Stellung ihrer Zugehörigkeit zum Arbeitsmarkt über die gesamte Dauer der Familienbildung bestimmen. Wir haben festgestellt, dass in Italien zwar relativ weniger Zweiverdienerhaushalte als in anderen Ländern bestehen, dass jedoch in diesem Fall in der Regel beide Ehepartner eine anspruchsvolle Laufbahn verfolgen. Weiterhin haben wir die Rolle homogamer Ehen im Hinblick darauf untersucht, dass ein Paar zunächst als Zweiverdiener-Haushalt beginnt und sich anschließend zu einer Partnerschaft entwickelt, in der beide Partner eine Karriere verfolgen. Schulbildung und Beruf der Ehegatten haben keinen Einfluss auf ihre jeweiligen Karrieremobilitätschancen. Insbesondere haben Bildung und berufliche Stellung des Ehemannes im Gegensatz zu den Ergebnissen anderer Studien keinen Einfluss auf die Berufstätigkeit der Ehefrau, es sei denn, im negativen Sinne, wenn der Ehemann über eine höhere Bildung verfügt als die Ehefrau. Ehen, in denen beide Ehepartner eine Karriere verfolgen, scheinen eher Ergebnis originär homogamer Merkmale der Ehepartner denn die Folge einer verstärkenden Wirkung des Sozialkapitals hoch gebildeter Ehemänner zu sein.' (Autorenreferat)'Based on a national longitudinal data set, this essays analyses the conditions that favour the formation of dual earner, and specifically dual career couples in Italy, i.e in a country characterized by comparatively low women's labour force participation and intra-generational mobility. Dual career couples include all couples in which both spouses belong to the higher occupational classes according to Erikson's and Goldthorpe's classification. Using EHA and cross-lag models, we have tested the role of women's education and occupational position in supporting their attachment to the labour market throughout the family formation years. We found that, although dual earner couples are comparatively fewer in Italy than in other countries, dual career ones are, in relative terms, the most common kind within them. We have also explored the role of homogamous marriages in shaping the possibility that a couple develops first as a dual earner and second as a dual career one. The school credentials possessed and the occupations performed by the spouses do not affect their respective career mobility chances. Particularly, contrary to findings of other studies, the husband's education and occupational position has no impact on the wife's occupation, except, negatively, when he is better educated than she. Dual career marriages seem more the result of original homogamous characteristics of spouses than of a reinforcing impact of the social capital of highly educated husbands.' (author's abstract

A new, putatively semisubterranean, Rhithrodytes diving beetle from southwestern Sardinia (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae)

[EN] The diving beetle genus Rhithrodytes Bameul, 1989 is endemic to areas surrounding the Western Mediterranean Basin, and currently includes six lotic species; three each in Europe and North Africa. Here we describe a striking new species, Rhithrodytes pantaleonii sp. nov., discovered during recent fieldwork in southwestern Sardinia. The new species differs markedly from the only previously known Rhithrodytes from the Tyrrhenian Islands, R. sexguttatus (Aubé, 1838). The pale, flattened appearance of R. pantaleonii sp. nov., together with its small eyes and scarcity during collecting, all point to it being semisubterranean. A combination of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA sequences, obtained non-destructively from the holotype, allow us to reconstruct the evolutionary history and historical biogeography of this taxon and take the opportunity to publish the mitogenome of the new species. Rhithrodytes pantaleonii sp. nov. is shown to be sister to R. sexguttatus, these taxa apparently having diverged during the Miocene, when the Sulcis-Iglesiente region of southwestern Sardinia was separated from the rest of Corsico-Sardinia by the Sardinian Seaway. Our discovery adds to our understanding of the biogeography of the Tyrrhenian Islands, and further highlights the importance of the Sulcis-Iglesiente region as an area of endemism in its own rightSIWe are grateful to Prof. Roberto Pantaleoni (University of Sassari) for his assistance in facilitating sampling in Sardinia in 2022. DTB’s fi eldwork was partly supported by funding from the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund. AV is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through a Humboldt Research Fellowship and by the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundatio