Background The efficient management of relational competences in healthcare professionals is cruc... more Background The efficient management of relational competences in healthcare professionals is crucial to ensuring that a patient’s treatment and care process is conducted positively. Empathy is a major component of the relational skills expected of health professionals. Knowledge of undergraduate healthcare students’ empathic abilities is important for educators in designing specific and efficient educational programmes aimed at supporting or enhancing such competences. In this study, we measured first-year undergraduate nursing students’ attitudes towards professional empathy in clinical encounters. The students’ motivations for entering nursing education were also evaluated. This study takes a multi-method approach based on the use of qualitative and quantitative tools to examine the association between students’ positive attitudes towards the value of empathy in health professionals and their prosocial and altruistic motivations in choosing to engage in nursing studies. Methods A ...
Educational activities based on dance can support interest in comprehension of concepts from math... more Educational activities based on dance can support interest in comprehension of concepts from maths, geometry, physics, bio-mechanics and computational thinking. In this work, we discuss a possible use of a dancing humanoid robot as an innovative technology to support and enhance STEAM learning activities.
Entrepreneurship Education (EE) represents a challenge for education systems across Europe and in... more Entrepreneurship Education (EE) represents a challenge for education systems across Europe and in particular for Italy, where EE is largely confined to technical and vocational studies. Introducing EE in the general secondary school curriculum means focusing on the development of skills and abilities now deemed an essential part of what is termed the “entrepreneurial mindset”. This in turn requires the adoption of teaching methodologies suitable for fostering those essential capabilities. Indeed, EE stretches beyond the acquisition of specific knowledge, encompassing efforts to make students active participants in their own learning, career path and life in general. This paper describes an EE training model defined within the European project “I can...I cannot...I go! Rev. 2”, funded by the Leonardo da Vinci Programme - Transfer of Innovation. It reports initial qualitative evaluation of the trial phase conducted with fourth-year students attending a technical school for tourism in ...
Un modello di formazione continua in medicina basato sull’utilizzo di funzionalita di comunicazio... more Un modello di formazione continua in medicina basato sull’utilizzo di funzionalita di comunicazione e cooperazione integrate nel Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico.
The demand to support special educative needs has considerably risen recently, highlighting the l... more The demand to support special educative needs has considerably risen recently, highlighting the longing of customized learning paths. According to the “Policy guidelines on inclusion in education” (UNESCO 2009, Paris), “the concept of inclusion focuses on the learning environments and it involves changes and modifications in content, approaches, structures and strategies, with a common vision that covers all children of the appropriate age range and a conviction that it is the responsibility of the regular system to educate all children”. The present paper presents a contribution along these lines that follows an inclusive edutainment (educational entertainment) paradigm to create a smart learning environment where students are provided with multi-modal and multi-sensory learning experiences in order to learn everywhere in a more entertaining fashion. Objectives: With the perspective to stimulate new ways of learning and teaching through ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and digital technologies, the aim is to reinvent and reuse the available ICT educational tools, i.e. affective, game-based and educational cloud learning, by complementing them with advances in educational methods coming from neuroscience and educational pedagogy and psychology theories. We would settle a continuum of education through the extension of the current didactic formal settings, as school classrooms and scientific laboratories, to real-life informal learning situations, as students’ households and museums. The proposed methodology would go towards the development of a specialist approach that might become an ordinary inclusive practice able to lead up students with different cognitive profiles to comparable learning levels. Methodologies: By means of a multidisciplinary approach that integrates educational tools and methods and motivating and engaging technologies will be used, socially assistive robots will guide primary school students (6 - 8 years old) through interactive personalized learning experiences featured by artworks by acting as cultural mediators of educational contents. Socially assistive robots have been successfully used in therapies of children with autism to foster communication and social relationships, expression and perception of emotions. They create interesting, appealing and meaningful interplay situations that compel children to interact with them with a greater verbal interaction. Indeed, children with autism, like most children, show a great affinity towards robots. Conclusions: The definition of an inclusive learning and teaching methodology within a continuum of informal smart learning environments supposes the deepening of a global and well-structured characterization of children’s cognitive profiles, along with an in-depth analysis of autistic and typically developed children’s cognitive processes and the differences among them. We expected the above described outcomes being supported by recent evidence based research outcomes that shows how cognitive skills in children with autism improve when educative tasks involve images.
Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, 1997
... An On-Line Cooperative Learning Environment. Mario Allegra, Antonella Chirafi, Giovanni Fulan... more ... An On-Line Cooperative Learning Environment. Mario Allegra, Antonella Chirafi, Giovanni Fulantelli, Simona Ottaviano. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
This paper proposes a methodological framework to support the design of educational games based o... more This paper proposes a methodological framework to support the design of educational games based on a semantic frame analysis. Starting from a Frame Semantics point of view, the authors provide a deepen analysis of game mechanics definitions using the key concept of verb. To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model an example is reported to illustrate how we can explicit the game mechanics used in a management/construction game by means of FrameNet and WordNet ontologies.
This study is based on the evidence that tests can be used as an educational tool to enhance lear... more This study is based on the evidence that tests can be used as an educational tool to enhance learning, not just as an evaluation tool. There is a growing body of research that shows that participating in repeated testing improves learning, a phenomenon defined as Test-Enhanced Learning. The aim of the present study was to analyse the effect of the use of a test enhanced learning program integrated into a general psychology course for undergraduate nursing students and its interaction with the students' test anxiety. 161 undergraduate nursing students attending a General Psychology course followed an educational program based on Test-Enhanced Learning methodology. Students were divided into two groups, an experimental group (TEL group) and a control group (Re-study group). TEL students took a multiple-choice test on the lecture topics. The Re-study group just read study material. Testing and re-study occurred at intervals of about a week after each lesson. TEL students received f...
Training and simulation games are a type of serious game that allow learners to deal with realist... more Training and simulation games are a type of serious game that allow learners to deal with realistic scenarios, to test their behavior under controlled conditions and to increase their understanding of the simulated system/process. In these games, the educational goal changes the issues related to the simulation design. In particular, achieving right balance between realism and teaching effectiveness is an essential design criterion. The difficulties in designing this type of serious games are particularly evident in the social field. In fact, this area is characterized by a complexity that is hard to design in formal terms. Starting from recent evolutions in the field of social simulation, this paper proposes the agent paradigm as a methodological tool to guide the design of serious games in the social field. The PNPV game, designed within the framework of the European project “I can … I cannot … I go!” Rev. 2 (PNPV project), which aims to introduce and foster an entrepreneurial mindset among young people, is described as a case study of a serious game developed by means of the agent based approach.
An important consequence of the diffusion of the Web is that end users are more and more getting ... more An important consequence of the diffusion of the Web is that end users are more and more getting used to browsing information according to the hypertext linking mechanism. As a consequence, not only will the number of hypertext structures increase in the near future, but also the demand of hypertext access to existing non-hypertextual sets of documents will become more and more pressing. However it is difficult to develop hypertext structures starting from an existing document collection. In this paper the authors analyze ...
Serious games are designed to train and educate learners, opening up new learning approaches like... more Serious games are designed to train and educate learners, opening up new learning approaches like exploratory learning and situated cognition. Despite growing interest in these games, their design is still an artisan process.On the basis of experiences in designing computer simulation, this paper proposes an agent-based approach to guide the design process of a serious game. The proposed methodology allows the designer to strike the right equilibrium between educational effectiveness and entertainment, realism and complexity.The design of the PNPVillage game is used as a case study. The PNPVillage game aims to introduce and foster an entrepreneurial mindset among young students. It was implemented within the framework of the European project “I can… I cannot… I go!” Rev.2
Over the last decade the Italian university system has been subject to a remarkable reform. The n... more Over the last decade the Italian university system has been subject to a remarkable reform. The number of courses has increased over time; registrations of news students have been rising more than 13 per cent, despite the Italian unemployment rate of graduates remains above the European average. In this new context, characterized by a growing competitive pressure, this paper tries to understand which today are the main determinants in the demand for academic education in Italy. For this purpose, we use data collected from a national survey by ITD-CNR in the first half of 2008, by means of a web questionnaire (consisting of 44 questions) filled in by students attending their high school final year. These data have been used in order to estimate two binomial logit models, which reveal that inertial factors are the main determinants of the demand for academic education in Italy, both for those students aimed to certainly continue their career, and for those who are irresolute. Families' social and cultural background seems relevant for resolute students, whereas it is not much significant for undecided students. Students' individual skills modestly affect the demand for academic education from students aimed to continue their career, whereas individual skills seem to be very relevant for more perplexed ones. Finally, the economic constraints show an absolute lack of statistic relevance.
Background The efficient management of relational competences in healthcare professionals is cruc... more Background The efficient management of relational competences in healthcare professionals is crucial to ensuring that a patient’s treatment and care process is conducted positively. Empathy is a major component of the relational skills expected of health professionals. Knowledge of undergraduate healthcare students’ empathic abilities is important for educators in designing specific and efficient educational programmes aimed at supporting or enhancing such competences. In this study, we measured first-year undergraduate nursing students’ attitudes towards professional empathy in clinical encounters. The students’ motivations for entering nursing education were also evaluated. This study takes a multi-method approach based on the use of qualitative and quantitative tools to examine the association between students’ positive attitudes towards the value of empathy in health professionals and their prosocial and altruistic motivations in choosing to engage in nursing studies. Methods A ...
Educational activities based on dance can support interest in comprehension of concepts from math... more Educational activities based on dance can support interest in comprehension of concepts from maths, geometry, physics, bio-mechanics and computational thinking. In this work, we discuss a possible use of a dancing humanoid robot as an innovative technology to support and enhance STEAM learning activities.
Entrepreneurship Education (EE) represents a challenge for education systems across Europe and in... more Entrepreneurship Education (EE) represents a challenge for education systems across Europe and in particular for Italy, where EE is largely confined to technical and vocational studies. Introducing EE in the general secondary school curriculum means focusing on the development of skills and abilities now deemed an essential part of what is termed the “entrepreneurial mindset”. This in turn requires the adoption of teaching methodologies suitable for fostering those essential capabilities. Indeed, EE stretches beyond the acquisition of specific knowledge, encompassing efforts to make students active participants in their own learning, career path and life in general. This paper describes an EE training model defined within the European project “I can...I cannot...I go! Rev. 2”, funded by the Leonardo da Vinci Programme - Transfer of Innovation. It reports initial qualitative evaluation of the trial phase conducted with fourth-year students attending a technical school for tourism in ...
Un modello di formazione continua in medicina basato sull’utilizzo di funzionalita di comunicazio... more Un modello di formazione continua in medicina basato sull’utilizzo di funzionalita di comunicazione e cooperazione integrate nel Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico.
The demand to support special educative needs has considerably risen recently, highlighting the l... more The demand to support special educative needs has considerably risen recently, highlighting the longing of customized learning paths. According to the “Policy guidelines on inclusion in education” (UNESCO 2009, Paris), “the concept of inclusion focuses on the learning environments and it involves changes and modifications in content, approaches, structures and strategies, with a common vision that covers all children of the appropriate age range and a conviction that it is the responsibility of the regular system to educate all children”. The present paper presents a contribution along these lines that follows an inclusive edutainment (educational entertainment) paradigm to create a smart learning environment where students are provided with multi-modal and multi-sensory learning experiences in order to learn everywhere in a more entertaining fashion. Objectives: With the perspective to stimulate new ways of learning and teaching through ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and digital technologies, the aim is to reinvent and reuse the available ICT educational tools, i.e. affective, game-based and educational cloud learning, by complementing them with advances in educational methods coming from neuroscience and educational pedagogy and psychology theories. We would settle a continuum of education through the extension of the current didactic formal settings, as school classrooms and scientific laboratories, to real-life informal learning situations, as students’ households and museums. The proposed methodology would go towards the development of a specialist approach that might become an ordinary inclusive practice able to lead up students with different cognitive profiles to comparable learning levels. Methodologies: By means of a multidisciplinary approach that integrates educational tools and methods and motivating and engaging technologies will be used, socially assistive robots will guide primary school students (6 - 8 years old) through interactive personalized learning experiences featured by artworks by acting as cultural mediators of educational contents. Socially assistive robots have been successfully used in therapies of children with autism to foster communication and social relationships, expression and perception of emotions. They create interesting, appealing and meaningful interplay situations that compel children to interact with them with a greater verbal interaction. Indeed, children with autism, like most children, show a great affinity towards robots. Conclusions: The definition of an inclusive learning and teaching methodology within a continuum of informal smart learning environments supposes the deepening of a global and well-structured characterization of children’s cognitive profiles, along with an in-depth analysis of autistic and typically developed children’s cognitive processes and the differences among them. We expected the above described outcomes being supported by recent evidence based research outcomes that shows how cognitive skills in children with autism improve when educative tasks involve images.
Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, 1997
... An On-Line Cooperative Learning Environment. Mario Allegra, Antonella Chirafi, Giovanni Fulan... more ... An On-Line Cooperative Learning Environment. Mario Allegra, Antonella Chirafi, Giovanni Fulantelli, Simona Ottaviano. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
This paper proposes a methodological framework to support the design of educational games based o... more This paper proposes a methodological framework to support the design of educational games based on a semantic frame analysis. Starting from a Frame Semantics point of view, the authors provide a deepen analysis of game mechanics definitions using the key concept of verb. To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model an example is reported to illustrate how we can explicit the game mechanics used in a management/construction game by means of FrameNet and WordNet ontologies.
This study is based on the evidence that tests can be used as an educational tool to enhance lear... more This study is based on the evidence that tests can be used as an educational tool to enhance learning, not just as an evaluation tool. There is a growing body of research that shows that participating in repeated testing improves learning, a phenomenon defined as Test-Enhanced Learning. The aim of the present study was to analyse the effect of the use of a test enhanced learning program integrated into a general psychology course for undergraduate nursing students and its interaction with the students' test anxiety. 161 undergraduate nursing students attending a General Psychology course followed an educational program based on Test-Enhanced Learning methodology. Students were divided into two groups, an experimental group (TEL group) and a control group (Re-study group). TEL students took a multiple-choice test on the lecture topics. The Re-study group just read study material. Testing and re-study occurred at intervals of about a week after each lesson. TEL students received f...
Training and simulation games are a type of serious game that allow learners to deal with realist... more Training and simulation games are a type of serious game that allow learners to deal with realistic scenarios, to test their behavior under controlled conditions and to increase their understanding of the simulated system/process. In these games, the educational goal changes the issues related to the simulation design. In particular, achieving right balance between realism and teaching effectiveness is an essential design criterion. The difficulties in designing this type of serious games are particularly evident in the social field. In fact, this area is characterized by a complexity that is hard to design in formal terms. Starting from recent evolutions in the field of social simulation, this paper proposes the agent paradigm as a methodological tool to guide the design of serious games in the social field. The PNPV game, designed within the framework of the European project “I can … I cannot … I go!” Rev. 2 (PNPV project), which aims to introduce and foster an entrepreneurial mindset among young people, is described as a case study of a serious game developed by means of the agent based approach.
An important consequence of the diffusion of the Web is that end users are more and more getting ... more An important consequence of the diffusion of the Web is that end users are more and more getting used to browsing information according to the hypertext linking mechanism. As a consequence, not only will the number of hypertext structures increase in the near future, but also the demand of hypertext access to existing non-hypertextual sets of documents will become more and more pressing. However it is difficult to develop hypertext structures starting from an existing document collection. In this paper the authors analyze ...
Serious games are designed to train and educate learners, opening up new learning approaches like... more Serious games are designed to train and educate learners, opening up new learning approaches like exploratory learning and situated cognition. Despite growing interest in these games, their design is still an artisan process.On the basis of experiences in designing computer simulation, this paper proposes an agent-based approach to guide the design process of a serious game. The proposed methodology allows the designer to strike the right equilibrium between educational effectiveness and entertainment, realism and complexity.The design of the PNPVillage game is used as a case study. The PNPVillage game aims to introduce and foster an entrepreneurial mindset among young students. It was implemented within the framework of the European project “I can… I cannot… I go!” Rev.2
Over the last decade the Italian university system has been subject to a remarkable reform. The n... more Over the last decade the Italian university system has been subject to a remarkable reform. The number of courses has increased over time; registrations of news students have been rising more than 13 per cent, despite the Italian unemployment rate of graduates remains above the European average. In this new context, characterized by a growing competitive pressure, this paper tries to understand which today are the main determinants in the demand for academic education in Italy. For this purpose, we use data collected from a national survey by ITD-CNR in the first half of 2008, by means of a web questionnaire (consisting of 44 questions) filled in by students attending their high school final year. These data have been used in order to estimate two binomial logit models, which reveal that inertial factors are the main determinants of the demand for academic education in Italy, both for those students aimed to certainly continue their career, and for those who are irresolute. Families' social and cultural background seems relevant for resolute students, whereas it is not much significant for undecided students. Students' individual skills modestly affect the demand for academic education from students aimed to continue their career, whereas individual skills seem to be very relevant for more perplexed ones. Finally, the economic constraints show an absolute lack of statistic relevance.
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