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The current exploratory study aimed to offer a description of the learning skills and well-being of multilingual adolescents with Italian as L2, a population regarded as vulnerable with respect to their academic achievements and psychosocial profile. We compared the performance of L2 participants with that of their monolingual peers with and without Specific Learning Disorders on a range of tests and questionnaires to define their learning skills and well-being within the school context. Results confirm greater reading difficulties in the L2 group compared to monolingual peers with Specific Learning Disorders. This pilot study offers one of the first investigations into the learning skills and well-being of a scarcely studied population, namely L2 adolescents. Additionally, it discusses practices that can be implemented within the classroom to promote inclusion.

ORCA.IT, a new online test of online research and comprehension was developed for the Italian population. A group of 183 students attending various types of upper secondary schools in Northern Italy were tested with the new tool and underwent further cognitive and neuropsychological assessment. The different school types involved in the study are representative of the school population in the Italian system, but can also be easily compared with the educational systems of other countries. The new test turned out to have good psychometric properties after accurate item construction and final selection. In particular, Version 1 showed better characteristics than Version 2. Subsequently, comparison with one-way ANOVAs were performed to test whether differences exist between different school types, between groups with and without reading difficulties, and between males and females. Such differences are sometimes reported in the literature, but many remain controversial. Further, Pearson's bivariate correlations were calculated to analyze associations between scores on the ORCA.IT and cognitive/neuropsychological variables. Finally, a stepwise regression analysis was performed on aggregated scores to identify the predictors of performance on each of the two versions. The test, especially in the most complete version (Version 1), appears to accurately and reliably capture students' web searching abilities and online reading comprehension. The tool could highlight differences in online search and comprehension ability between students with and without reading difficulties, not penalizing overall performance but allowing very specific weaknesses to be pointed out. Further, it seems to be able to capture differences due to both educational pathways (different school types) and social attitudes (differences between males and females). Most interestingly, it shows to be clearly resting on specific cognitive and neuropsychological abilities, including language, memory, and attentional skills, which explain a large portion of the total variance. Offline text reading comprehension is a crucial predictor of online reading performance, while decoding ability is not. Prior knowledge also influences the results, as expected. The new tool turns out to be rather independent of previous Internet experience and to measure more cognitively grounded processes related to information gathering, processing, and communicating.

The aim of this work is to contribute to the identification of the factors which can promote students’ engagement at school and support flourishing in young people. According to the Positive Education (Seligman, 2011), there is a strong relationship between school environment and student’s well-being. Fatou and Kubiszewski (2018) found that the quality of the school climate perceived by the students influences engagement in school activities. In this study, 153 students (M = 67) attending 10th grade were presented with tests and questionnaires to assess individual assets (personality traits, literacy skills), emerging appraisals (school-climate, well-being experience) and emerging actions (school engagement), according to the Student Well-Being Model proposed by Soutter et al., (2014). Path analysis showed that the best model includes neither individual assets nor direct effect of school climate on engagement, as the effect of school climate on engagement is mediated by well-being experience. In other words, school climate has been confirmed as an important factor to be considered to improve engagement in school activities, but it is effective only when its influence can modify the well-being experience of the students. These results support the perspective of Positive Education, as intervention on school environment is expected to exert positive effects not only on students’ well-being, but also on their engagement in school activities and learning, irrespective to students’ assets. Therefore, improving school climate means to support well-being experience and to reduce dropout risk also in students with learning difficulties and with personality traits, which might lead to dysfunctional behaviors. This work encourages working in/with schools to implement positive education programs that support and sustain a positive school climate and culture for school-community well-being.

The use of technology for educational purposes is a consolidated reality, and many new tools are constantly being devised and offered for use with both normally developing children and children with special needs. Nonetheless, a detailed analysis of the processes being stimulated and of the goals being pursued is often lacking or absent. In this work we describe the design, development and preliminary testing of an integrated system which combines the use of smart devices, a physical cube, augmented reality (AR) technology, a smart TV, and a software application especially designed to stimulate cognitive and social functions in pre-school children. The system was tested with three groups of children (25 children in total) during kindergarten activities. The results show that the system is easy to understand, elicits high levels of participation and social interaction, favors strategic behaviors, and can be used by the children with limited need of instruction and support by the adult. The implications for empowerment in typically developing children and the possibilities for use with children who have specific impairments in social communication are discussed.

Short-term memory (STM) models distinguish between item and order memorization. The present study aims to explore how item and order STM are affected by the nature of the stimuli, the sequential versus simultaneous mode of presentation, the visual versus auditory presentation modality, the possibility of verbal recoding. A total of 20 children with dyslexia were matched one-by-one with 20 typically reading children on sex, age (8-14 years), and grade. Computerized STM tasks were administered while manipulating type (item vs. order), stimuli (letters vs. colors), sequentiality, input and output modality, as well as the presence/absence of articulatory suppression and distractors. General Linear Model analyses were conducted on accuracy scores for item and order STM. Both item and order recall scores were lower for children with dyslexia. Although order STM in the visual input condition turned out to be more impaired than item STM in the dyslexic group, both item and order memory impairments become evident when verbal recoding is prevented through articulatory suppression. Moreover, dyslexic children, unlike typical readers, were not facilitated by the linguistic nature of the stimuli to be remembered. The present findings suggest that the often-reported selective impairment of serial memory in dyslexia is restricted to stimuli that are verbal in nature or can be verbally recoded, whereas both item and order memory impairments become evident when verbal recoding is prevented through articulatory suppression. The presence of distractors is particularly detrimental to STM in the dyslexic group. The sensitivity to distractors, suppression, and stimuli in STM is predictive of reading performance.

The aim of this research was the comparison between the data of two studies, both based on the application of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory Scale (NPI) to samples of undergraduate students. The first sample (Baldi, 1998) consisted of 800 students, aged between 19 and 24, equally divided by gender, University and Faculty; the second one was recently conducted on a number of participants almost equal to the previous (808 students, aged between 18 and 25), with the same stratification by gender and Faculty. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory uses behavioural criteria as defined by American Psychiatric Association in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (3rd ed.) (DSM-II1) to evaluate narcissistic personality and also used by DSM-IV. The "narcissistic personality disorder" was later counted among the "personality disorders" by DSM-5. The data analysis show the following results: 1) a four-factor structure is confirmed, as previously reported by other authors (see, e.g., Emmons, 1984, 1987); 2) some items, which are saturated in the first or in the second factors are different in our two surveys: however in both of them the mostly saturated items in the first component (which accounts for the greatest percentage of variance), refer to exploitation and/or manipulation personality traits; 3) similar findings in relation to gender differences and Faculty are observed in our studies: males are more disposed to adopt narcissistic attitudes and behaviors; students of Law, both men and women, report higher scores of "narcissism" than students of Humanities, whose scores are lower than those of all the other Faculties.

The psychometric properties of Richardson's 1977 Verbalizer-Visual-izer Questionnaire have been studied by analyzing papers in which this questionnaire was employed. Such review showed that the Verbalizer-Visualizer Questionnaire does not measure a unidimensional construct and does not predict the actual use of mental imagery in thinking. Further, a lack of long-term reliability of the questionnaire emerged. In conclusion, use of the questionnaire to assess the verbal-visual cognitive style appears questionable.

The purpose of the present study aims to investigate the relationship between circadian typology and learning–thinking styles conceptualised as a preference toward information processing typical of the right vs. the left cerebral hemisphere. A sample of 1254 undergraduates (380 boys and 874 girls; mean age = 21.86 ± 2.37,) was administered the reduced version of the Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire (r-MEQ), which detects three chronotypes (morning-, intermediate- or evening-types), and the Style Of Learning And Thinking (SOLAT) questionnaire, conceived as a tool to measure the tendency toward the right-, integrated-, and left thinking. A two-way ANOVA on SOLAT scores with circadian typology and gender, as between-subjects factor, and age as covariant, showed that morning-types scored higher in the left-thinking scale than intermediate- and evening-types, and that evening-types obtained significant higher scores for right-thinking style than intermediate- and morning-types. This circadian typology effect was also confirmed by multiple regression.

Opinions about the psychological correlates of multimedia computer-supported instructional tools were analyzed by means of a questionnaire concerning the motivational and emotional aspects of multimedia learning, the strategies to be followed during the learning process, the mental abilities and the style of thinking required, the cognitive benefits and outcomes. The questionnaire was distributed to 272 teachers working in kindergarten, primary, and secondary schools. Gender and previous experience with multimedia, as well as the disciplinary fields taught by secondary school teachers, were taken into account. Respondents identified a large number of non-trivial instructional opportunities from multimedia and showed well-defined and internally articulated beliefs. No significant gender effect was found. Differences of school level, disciplinary field, and direct experience with multimedia tools affected a part of the teachers' representation. Implications for instruction were discussed.

Subjects, when asked to assess whether imagery can fachtate cognitive tasks such as learning and reasoning, ascribe an important role to mental visualization (Denis & Carfantan, 1985). However, diary studies suggested that people do not use visual images spontaneously in goal-oriented thinking (Kosslyn, Seger, Pani, & Hillger, 1990). This finhg is consistent with efficacy ratings which showed that imagery is not conceptualized as a useful tool to memorize, solve problems, plan, and make decisions (Antonietti & Baldo, 1994). Such discrepancies suggest further study of people's opinions about the functions of mental images in cognition. In this study 250 undergraduates in different disciplines, ages between 20 and 25 years, were asked to fd out a questionnaire about the role of mental imagery. The questionnaire of 28 items was an enlarged version of a previous one (Antonietti & Baldo, 1994). On each item subjects had to rate on a 5-point scale how useful, in their opinion, mental images are to carry out a specific cognitive activity. Mean ratings on each item are shown in.Table 1. Data were analyzed according to the principal component method. Application of the scree test led to extraction of five factors. Table 1 reports the factorial structure after varirnax rotation. Factor 1 is loaded by items involving mathematical representations. Factor 2 includes items concerning stirnd visual in nature such as scenes, pictures, or persons. Factor 3 refers to everyday-life practical activities. Factor 4 can be labelled as "conceptual thinking." Finally, items with high loadings on Factor 5 are hked to daydreaming about problems involving people. This study replicated the previous result (Antonietti & Baldo, 1994) that imagery is thought to be more useful to process elements which are originally visual or spatial but not those which are originally verbal or abstract and so need to be recoded in a visuospatial format. In addition, there is evidence that subjects rate ddferently the efficacy of mental visuakation