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This research investigated how the bug tracker database of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Moodle is developed as an application of crowd work. The bug tracker is used by software developers, who write and maintain Moodle's code, but also by a wider public world of ordinary Moodle users who can report bugs. Despite many studies of the phenomenon of open source bug fixing and software building, much remains to be answered. Specifically, we sought to analyse the implications of this massively distributed collaborative development process for education and educational technology. The research examined the ways educators interface and contribute to the development of the VLE Moodle at the granular level of bug fixing as an example of a global crowdsourced activity. In this study, twenty community participants were interviewed, from fringe members, to key actors, including lead developers from the Open University, Moodle HQ and Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas. We uncovered rich stories of practices of community members. We found that projects are complex interplays of many actors assuming different roles and identities, and that brokers, or "kindly souls", play a key role in activities such as filing reports on behalf of others, or inducting new members.

Unlike children's early ability to navigate by continuous boundaries, their ability to extract geometric information from an array of objects emerges gradually over childhood. To investigate children's developing representation of object arrays for navigation and its relation to their mental representation of the global spatial layout, reorientation behavior was tested in 146 children (4-9 years, 78 male children and 68 female children, Italian) with rectangular arrays made up of 20 objects. Posttest questions on children's spatial language and their mental and pictorial representation of the environment were administered. Although children of all ages navigated by the geometry of continuous boundary-like arrays, they only succeeded with separated object arrays at around 7 years of age. This developmental change was predicted by children's individual ability to extract the abstract geometry of the spatial layout in a two-dimensional picture of the room.

We report the results of a study on high school student difficulties in drawing the magnetic field lines for two magnets facing each other. Student difficulties were investigated by means of a predict-observe-explain activity. Our data confirm some of the previous results from the educational research literature on student difficulties in drawing and interpreting field lines and shed some new light on students' reasoning patterns. Specific difficulties for the case of two magnets with opposite poles facing each other are also identified.

In this work, we examined mathematical knowledge mobilised by mathematics teachers while interpreting students' answers, which we denote as Interpretative Knowledge (IK). In particular, we analysed the IK of prospective mathematics teachers (PTs), who were students of a Mathematics Education course for the Master's Degree in Mathematics. In order to study the possible development of the IK of these students, we explored their interpretations of secondary students' productions and compared those given before, during, and after a collective discussion about these productions. Our findings reveal considerable differences in PTs' knowledge and interpretations provided during the three activities, confirming that these and similar activities can be useful in training mathematics teachers in order to develop their IK.

Even in primary school, mathematics achievement depends upon the efficiency of cognitive, metacognitive and self-regulatory processes. Thus, for pupils to carry out a computation, such as a written calculation, metacognitive mechanisms play a crucial role, since children must employ self-regulation to assess the precision of their own thinking and performance. This assessment, in turn, can be helpful in the regulation of their own learning. In this regard, a body of literature suggests that the application of psychoeducational interventions that promote the development of mathematics-related metacognitive (e.g., control) processes, based on the analysis of the students' errors, can successfully influence mathematics performance. The main objective of the current study was to investigate the impact of a metacognitive and cognitive training program developed to enhance various arithmetic skills (e.g., syntax, mental and written calculation), self-regulatory and control functions in primary and secondary school students exhibiting atypical mathematical development. Sixty-eight Italian children, 36 male and 32 female (mean age at pretest = 9.3 years, SD = 1.02 years), meeting the criteria for the diagnosis of dyscalculia or specific difficulties in mathematics, took part in the study. Of these, 34 children (i.e., experimental group) underwent the cognitive and self-regulatory intervention enhancing mathematics skills training for 16 weekly sessions. The remaining students were assigned to the control group. For a pre-test and post-test, a battery of standardized mathematical tests assessing different mathematics skills, such as written and mental operations, digit transcription and number ordering skills, was administered and provided a series of measures of calculation time and accuracy (i.e., number of errors). In the post-test, the experimental group exhibited better accuracy in written calculation and in digit transcription. Overall, the current outcomes demonstrate that psychoeducational interventions enriching metacognitive and mathematical achievements through error analysis may be an effective way to promote both the development of self-regulatory and control skills and mathematical achievement in children with atypical mathematical development.

Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing fluency and quality, particularly during the transition from the kindergarten to primary school; in contrast, studies dealing with orthographically transparent languages found small or no relations between transcription skills and writing competence. The present study examined the question of whether, in a transparent language like Italian, spelling and handwriting abilities predicted the narrative competence of primary-school children, and whether their effects varied as a function of grade. To this purpose, 150 Italian-speaking children (77 boys and 73 girls), attending the third, fourth, and fifth grades, were examined: they underwent an assessment of receptive vocabulary and wrote a fictional story starting from a keyword. Written compositions were scored for handwriting quality, spelling errors, productivity, syntactic complexity, and the use of narrative categories. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that, after eliminating the contributions of receptive vocabulary and productivity measures, only handwriting quality was significantly and positively related to the number of narrative categories utilized by children. In addition, the impact of the two transcription skills did not vary across grades. These findings suggest that, in a transparent language like Italian, spelling ability has a limited influence on the development of narrative competence in primary-school children (at least after the third grade). On the other hand, extensive practice in handwriting might have beneficial effects, by freeing resources that children might utilize to improve the structural organization of written narratives.

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts.

This article presents a study performed to investigate the role of simulation in second language learning while using a virtual environment. Participants were asked to explore a virtual park while learning 15 new Czech verbs (action verbs that describe movements performed with either the hand or the foot, and abstract verbs). This learning condition was compared with a baseline condition, where movements (either virtual or real) were not allowed. The goal was to investigate whether the virtual action (performed with the feet) would promote or interfere with the learning of verbs describing actions that were performed with the same or a different effector. The number of verbs correctly remembered in a free recall task was computed, along with reaction times and number of errors during a recognition task. Results show that the simulation per se has no effect in verbal learning, but the features of the virtual experience mediate it.

Spelling errors are usually studied in dictations, but teachers report that children with school difficulties often make spelling mistakes when they copy a text too. The present study examines the performance on a text copying task and a text dictation task of two groups of children known for their difficulties in spelling, that is, 22 with symptoms of ADHD and 13 with dyslexia, comparing them with matched controls to see whether children with spelling difficulties make more copying task errors than do controls, whether they make fewer mistakes when copying than when writing under dictation, and whether the pattern of errors remains the same or differs in copy and dictation tasks. Our results show that although children with spelling difficulties made fewer errors in the copying task than under dictation, they still made phonological errors and mistakes relating to accents and duplicates. The pattern of errors differed slightly between the children with dyslexia and those with ADHD, presumably as a consequence of their different underlying weaknesses--related mainly to phonology and orthographic representation in the case of dyslexia and to attentional control in the case of ADHD.

The current study evaluated the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) platforms, developed within the scope of the SKILLS Integrated Project, for industrial maintenance and assembly (IMA) tasks training. VR and AR systems are now widely regarded as promising training platforms for complex and highly demanding IMA tasks. However, there is a need to empirically evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness compared to traditional training methods. Forty expert technicians were randomly assigned to four training groups in an electronic actuator assembly task: VR (training with the VR platform twice), Control-VR (watching a filmed demonstration twice), AR (training with the AR platform once), and Control-AR (training with the real actuator and the aid of a filmed demonstration once). A post-training test evaluated performance in the real task. Results demonstrate that, in general, the VR and AR training groups required longer training time compared to the Control-VR and Control-AR groups, respectively. There were fewer unsolved errors in the AR group compared to the Control-AR group, and no significant differences in final performance between the VR and Control-VR groups, probably due to a ceiling effect created by the use of two training trials in the selected task for participants who were expert technicians. The results suggest that use of the AR platform for training IMA tasks should be encouraged and use of the VR platform for that purpose should be further evaluated.

A sample of 170 Italian children was assessed for reading accuracy, reading speed, text comprehension and spelling in Grades 1 and 3 in order to investigate the concurrent and longitudinal relationships among literacy skills. Main results from multivariate analyses (regression, discriminant and path analyses) indicated that reading speed was the best predictor of later literacy and that spelling was the most stable measure and influenced text comprehension and reading speed. An asymmetry was also observed in the longitudinal relationship between reading and spelling errors, with reading errors predicting later spelling errors and a non-significant result in the opposite direction. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

The objective of this research is to provide an improved automated computational tool to study aphasic production. Using the speech production of Italian aphasic patients, the present study demonstrates the possibility of applying an integrated algorithm to automatically assess and generate error patterns typical of aphasic speech. Philological studies and aphasia studies share one common point: errors (or variants) are informative, and the intention of the authors (in the case of philology) or of the patients (in the case of aphasiology) is to be established. For this precise reason, the present study adapts a tool, originally used in computational philology for the alignment of textual variants (Boschetti, 2007, 2008), and puts it to use for assessing aphasic patient's speech error patterns. As is demonstrated, this tool is effective and analytical. The authors expect this to be beneficial for the use of analysing aphasic production in both clinical and academic settings. (Contains 12 tables.)

Every article sent by an author to a reputed scientific journal undergoes a rigorous editorial evaluation. The editor has the final responsibility of accepting or rejecting manuscripts and thus can confer authority and validity on the author's research and help to disseminate new knowledge. In this task, editors make use of a panel of expert peer reviewers in the field who examine the manuscript and make recommendations. Some aspects of the peer review process have been investigated by medical scientists and by linguists but to the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies conducted on peer reviewer comments of medical articles written in English by Italian researchers. The present study aimed to establish the most frequent types of comments made by peer reviewers to identify the most frequent linguistic problems that Italian researchers encounter in this process. A collection of clinical research manuscripts submitted by Italian medical researchers to reputable English language journals were analysed together with the comments by editors and reviewers. The most frequent comments and criticisms were mainly in the area of scientific and methodological content, followed by lexical and grammatical errors, clarity and verbosity or repetition. An awareness of the features which might affect the acceptance or rejection of manuscripts may help novice writers and furnish training materials to aid researchers in writing publications in English. (Contains 1 figure and 3 tables.)

Pupils' mistakes, if suitably analysed, may give useful suggestions for improving the teaching/learning process of mathematics. We present here the main issues of an investigation on a population of 732 Italian pupils (9--12 years old), addressed to determine the typology of errors in performing written subtraction. We compared our results with those emerging from a study carried out in Brazil on pupils of the same age, concerning the errors in performing the usual algorithm of written subtraction. In our study, one group of Italian pupil utilized the usual algorithm and another group utilized an algorithm also called "Austrian subtraction", which was commonly taught in the primary schools of Trieste (Italy) up to the sixties and is still taught in Austria. We attempted to assess whether certain error patterns depend on different ethnic--cultural situations, teaching methods and algorithm used, and to what extent. We briefly present results from the experimental research and subsequent developments.

Observes several regular error patterns when a group of seven-year-old Italian children transcode arabic numerals to verbal numerals. Explains the development of transcoding ability by an asemantic model using production rules. Contains 15 references. (Author/ASK)