Into the looking glass: Literacy acquisition and mirror invariance in preschool and first-grade children

At what point in reading development does literacy impact object recognition and orientation processing? Is it specific to mirror images? To answer these questions, forty-six 5- to 7-year-old preschoolers and first graders performed two same–different tasks differing in the matching criterion-orientation-based versus shape-based (orientation independent)-on geometric shapes and letters. On orientation-based judgments, first graders out- performed preschoolers who had the strongest difficulty with mirrored pairs. On shape-based judgments, first graders were slower for mirrored than identical pairs, and even slower than preschoolers. This mirror cost emerged with letter knowledge. Only first graders presented worse shape-based judgments for mirrored and rotated pairs of reversible (e.g., b-d; b-q) than nonreversible (e.g., e-ә) letters, indicating readers’ difficulty in ignoring orientation contrasts relevant to letters.

From Traditional Assessment to the New Competency-Based Assessment

The evaluation of school students has always attempted to estimate the effort, abilities and learning of students. However, at the beginning, evaluation consisted in measuring the progress of the student’s behavior compared to a desirable behavior. Later on, different changes in evaluation benefited the processes addressed to assessing the academic achievement of students and learning itself. Today, the demands of the contemporary society are vast and numerous: students not only require knowledge, they need to develop skills, values and postures. Postmodern education requires individuals to develop different talents and competencies to grow in every way. Therefore, evaluation should respond to such needs promoting an ethical, technical, reliable assessment of the student’s competencies, thus providing more fair and objective, qualitative and quantitative judgments. This dissertation project is the result of a literature review of several authors and the daily work of teachers in the Centros de Educación Media Superior a Distancia [High School Distance Centers] of Morelos, Mexico.

Essays in the Economics of the Family and Cultural Transmission

My research aims at identifying the role cultural-ethnic traits play in marriage choices and at uncovering the implications of marital sorting on consequent intra-household decisions. From different perspectives, this thesis focuses on intermarriages, within the Italian marriage market. In the first chapter, I explore the role of ethnic endogamy on marital instability. I document the existence of a positive differential in marital instability of interethnic marriages compared to homogeneous ones and I demonstrate that genetic and ethnolinguistic measures of cultural diversity are informative about the incidence of marital dissolution. The second chapter investigates a novel channel, which explains the differential in household stability and investments across family types: cultural socialization of children. I propose a marital matching model along cultural-ethnic lines, to study the process of family formation and intra-household decision making in a context where ethnic differences between spouses potentially matter both in terms of preferences and technologies for household production. The observed intermarriage, fertility, separation and socialization rates are in line with theoretical predictions and they are consistent with strong preferences of parents toward cultural socialization of children to their own ethnic identity. In the third chapter, I propose and estimate a marital matching model along ethnic lines. I argue that gains to intermarriage depend on both cultural preferences and legal status motives. Taking advantage of the exogenous EU enlargements to East European countries in 2004 and 2007, I show that gains to intermarriage of East European migrants significantly decrease in response to the acquisition of the legal status. The final chapter aims to understand whether judicial decisions respond to the ethnic identity of spouses and what incentives those judgments are guided, by looking at separation and divorce sentences. Studying the legal custody assignment of children, I document a significant differential interacting mothers’ ethnicities with the family type.

La disciplina della contumacia del convenuto nei processi civili dell'Unione Europea. Standard comuni e possibilità di armonizzazioni

The fundamental right to a fair trial depends largely on the service of proceedings on the defendant; it is very important that this communication act informs the defendant of the existence of proceedings against him so that he has the possibility to defend himself in sufficient time. The casuistry shows that difficulties considerably increase when this first service of process has to be effected abroad. Indeed, the most problematic foreign judgments are those issued in absentia of the defendant. The European legislator has paid special attention to the service of the claim and to the default of appearance of the defendant; it has laid down both rules governing the ways in which the service of proceedings must be effected and the procedural treatment of involuntary default, including remedies available for

Genus seditiosorum. L'oratoria dei populares nelle testimonianze e nei frammenti (133-44 a.C.)

Il lavoro verifica l’ipotesi dell’esistenza, durante la tarda repubblica romana (133-44 a.C.), di uno stile oratorio riconoscibile come proprio dei populares. Per identificarne le caratteristiche tecniche distintive si procede, previa revisione e aggiornamento dell’edizione critica di riferimento (Malcovati 19764), alla traduzione delle testimonianze e dei frammenti oratori relativi ai 25 principali esponenti della pars popularis (da P. Licinio Crasso Divite Muciano a G. Scribonio Curione il Giovane) e al commento di tali testi. Nell’introduzione vengono discussi, alla luce di un’esposizione dettagliata dei relativi status quaestionis e di una rilettura delle fonti, i seguenti punti: esistenza dei populares; identificazione degli oratori populares; modalità di selezione e trasmissione del materiale oratorio e caratteristiche della sua tradizione; stato del materiale e modalità migliori di edizione; eloquentia popularis in Cicerone (impiegata anche dagli ottimati); stile oratorio di Gaio Gracco, di Giulio Cesare e degli oratori graccani, mariani e cesariani; riformulazione della categoria critica (eloquentia popularium) e conclusioni storiche e stilistiche. Nella trattazione sono integrati i risultati della ricerca, che consentono di formulare di volta in volta un giudizio autonomo. I dati vengono proposti anche in forma di tabelle in tre appendici, che presentano: l’attività politico-legislativa di G. Gracco, Saturnino, Clodio e Cesare a confronto (1), le figure e gli aspetti retorici rilevati nei frammenti (2.1), i giudizi sullo stile e le qualità retoriche riscontrati nelle testimonianze (2.2). Nel commento si rende ragione delle principali questioni filologiche, storiche e storiografiche relative a ciascun passo, mentre il focus è posto sugli aspetti linguistici e retorici. Vengono messe in luce le indicazioni offerte dalla fonte sul contesto performativo, per poi passare all’analisi puntuale (sinora un desideratum della critica) degli argumenta e dello stile oratorio e studiare, infine, come tali dati si inseriscano nel quadro complessivo dell’eloquenza di questo gruppo di oratori.

Prima Facie: four facets of gender bias in personnel selection.

Recent findings have highlighted a ‘perfection bias’, that is women being evaluated on more criteria than men in the workplace (Moscatelli et al., 2020; Prati et al., 2019). However, these studies have not considered faces as stimuli, even if facial first impressions can affect several real-world outcomes (Todorov et al., 2015). On this basis, the present research aimed to verify the presence of a perfection bias at face perception level, employing for the first time all the four facets of the fundamental dimensions of social judgments (i.e., competence, dominance, morality, sociability; Abele et al., 2016) and attractiveness (Hosoda et al., 2003) as evaluation criteria of applicants’ hireability. Four experiments were conducted (total N = 645), employing a gender-neutral position (Study 1) as well as managerial positions (Study 2, 3, 4) and recruiting Italian and British students (Study 1, 2) as well as British workers (Study 3, 4). Results of Study 1 confirmed that male applicants were evaluated only on their facial competence, while female applicants were evaluated on all the other facial traits. However, the other three studies showed a different and unexpected pattern: besides facial attractiveness and competence considered equally important for both male and female applicants, facial dominance was considered as more important in evaluating women, while facial morality and sociability were considered as more important in evaluating men. Hence, results highlighted a sort of ‘deficit bias’, so that counter stereotypic traits in which men and women are believed weak (Fiske, 1998) were more relevant for their hireability.