Why Asian children outperform students from other countries? Linguistic and parental influences comparing Chinese and Italian children in Preschool Education

This paper focusing on the complex situation of the Italian multiculturalism and trying to reply to why Asian children mathematically outperform students from other countries, discusses from the epistemological point of view, Chinese children’s skills before to start their formal education in Italian educational school context. A review of the literature, comparing pre-schoolers competences of Asian and Western students, reveals two important influenced factors: linguistic and parental stimuli. In particular many researchers showed that the structure of the Chinese language provides in children a head start in basic math skills, for example to discover, since preschool activities, a pre-algebraic structures of writing. An example with numbers is shown in the paper. Other studies also show that Asian parents, compared to the Western cultures ones, tend to promote in a strong way the development of good basic mathematics skills and a stronger epistemological discipline foundation. A general framework on these two important aspects for the education context is presented with the aim to help teacher and researchers to better understand Chinese and Italian possible different cognitive styles in mathematics learning just from Preschool

Problems with variation: an educational experience of cultural transposition with prospective primary teachers

The paper presents some theoretical reflections and some methodological notes about a Professional Development (PD) path worked out during the last two years by Italian researchers for prospective Primary teachers. The theoretical construct of Cultural Transposition defines the framework of the PD path’s activities and the related research. It was used to define an interesting cultural lent to delineate possible new approaches for effective pre-service teacher education programs, in particular for the Primary level. The defined methodology was based on the possibility to reflect about the decentralization of didactic practices based on a specific cultural context through one or more contacts with other “realities” coming out from different selected cultural contexts. In the last section of the paper we argue that the contact with a different didactic perspective coming from the Chinese “problems with variation” (one of the stimuli proposed in the PD’ path), encouraged some reflections by the Italian pre-service teachers on the use of “variation” in Math word-problems for an early approach to Algebra in Primary level

A quantitative method to analyse an open-ended questionnaire: A case study about the Boltzmann Factor

This paper describes a quantitative method to analyse an openended questionnaire. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are quantitatively analysed by not hierarchical clustering called k-means method. Through this we can characterise behaviour students with respect their expertise to formulate explanations for phenomena or processes and/or use a given model in the different context. The physics topic is about the Boltzmann Factor, which allows the students to have a unifying view of different phenomena in different contexts

Investigating the quality of mental models deployed by undergraduate engineering students in creating explanations: The case of thermally activated phenomena

This paper describes a method aimed at pointing out the quality of the mental models undergraduate engineering students deploy when asked to create explanations for phenomena or processes and/or use a given model in the same context. Student responses to a specially designed written questionnaire are quantitatively analyzed using researcher-generated categories of reasoning, based on the physics education research literature on student understanding of the relevant physics content. The use of statistical implicative analysis tools allows us to successfully identify clusters of students with respect to the similarity to the reasoning categories, defined as "practical or everyday," "descriptive," or "explicative." Through the use of similarity and implication indexes our method also enables us to study the consistency in students' deployment of mental models. A qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with students after they had completed the questionnaire is used to clarify some aspects which emerged from the quantitative analysis and validate the results obtained. Some implications of this joint use of quantitative and qualitative analysis for the design of a learning environment focused on the understanding of some aspects of the world at the level of causation and mechanisms of functioning are discussed

A multiscale model for traffic regulation via autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) allow new ways of regulating the traffic flow on road networks. Most of available results in this direction are based on microscopic approaches, where ODEs describe the evolution of regular cars and AVs. In this paper, we propose a multiscale approach, based on recently developed models for moving bottlenecks. Our main result is the proof of existence of solutions for open-loop controls with bounded variation