Levrini Olivia

University of Bologna | UNIBO · Department of Physics and Astronomy DIFA

Disciplinary identity is widely studied in physics (and science) education research. Great attention has been devoted to studying the role of sociocultural factors in students' career choices and persistence, such as students' participation or gender differences. However, few works within the literature have investigated the role of the cognitive-e...

The teaching of quantum technologies has now become a leading topic and is at the heart of numerous international programs (e.g., quantum flagship, National Quantum Initiative, UK national quantum technology program) with the aim of widening the workforce and preparing the next generations of experts. In the present contribution, we present an appr...

In a historical moment in which Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have become within everyone’s reach, science education needs to find new ways to foster “AI literacy.” Since the AI revolution is not only a matter of having introduced extremely performant tools but has been determining a radical change in how we conceive and produce know...

We live in a historical period that sociologists call the “society of acceleration”, where changes, mainly triggered by science and technology, occur over increasingly shorter time intervals. International reports by the OECD, the European Commission, and UNESCO highlight a worrying detachment between scientific education at school and societal iss...

Among the relevant aspects of the family resemblance approach (FRA), our study focuses on the potential of the approach to elaborate on disciplinary identities in an interdisciplinary context, specifically regarding the interplay between physics and mathematics. We present and discuss how the FRA wheel can be used and intertwined with the framework...

The present project is a result of a collaboration of research groups of five European academic institutions specialised in science, mathematics and computer science education. The project aims to the design and development of interdisciplinary teaching modules for pre-service teacher training in advanced STEM topics, as well as in curricular inter...

Interdisciplinarity (ID) represents nowadays a complex, multi-dimensional and timely challenge in STEM and, more in general, in STEAM education. If on one side ID is at the core of the most urgent societal issues, in schools and universities disciplines are almost exclusively taught separately and rigid boundaries are created. After a long period o...

DESCRIPTION Research on conceptual change addresses the question of how the conceptual resources that learners bring to the context of formal instruction are transformed into conceptual understanding consistent with the accepted knowledge in some domain. Research has been conducted on conceptual change in domains such as science, mathematics, histo...

In this era of great uncertainty, imagining the future may be challenging, especially for young people. In science education, the interest in future-oriented education is now emerging, research needs, however, to keep eyes on youngsters’ future perceptions and on the development of a future literacy. In this article, starting from a sample of indiv...

The article sets out to contribute to the educational challenge launched by the second quantum revolution. An approach to quantum computing has been outlined for secondary school students. The approach is shaped as a set of four principles that have been pointed out to design instructional materials to enhance the educational and cultural potential...

In this paper, we analyze different presentations in a historical text by Galileo and a textbook for high school of the parabolic motion of a projectile with a lens developed within Mathematics education research on argumentation and proof (cognitive unity; Mariotti et al., 1997; Pedemonte, 2005). The analysis highlights possibilities and problemat...

The article describes the analysis of the Italian physics curriculum documents in terms of the coverage of nature of science (NOS). NOS is not explicitly presented as part of the Italian high-school physics curriculum. The article focuses on analysing the implicit aspects of the curriculum documents. The Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to NOS was...

This book starts with the premise that beauty can be an engine of transformation and authentic engagement in an increasingly complex world. It presents an organized picture of highlights from the 13th European Science Education Research Association Conference, ESERA 2019, held in Bologna, Italy. The collection includes contributions that discuss co...

En este artículo se reflexiona sobre la definición de interdisciplinariedad y cómo llevarla al aula en el marco de la educación STEM. La identificación de objetos frontera y activadores epistemológicos son la base del diseño e implementación de dos módulos para la formación del profesorado; a partir de ellos se evidenciaron las dificultades de inte...

The paper focuses on a Quantum Computing teaching module for high school students that was designed and implemented within the I SEE Erasmus+ project ( https://iseeproject.eu ) The module is discussed as an example of how the S-T-E-M disciplines can be integrated to stress the conceptual, epistemological, and social relevance of quantum computing....

The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper...

This article takes its point of departure from the younger generation's problematic relationship with time and the future. A general sense of changeability and directionlessness in society compromises young people's confidence in themselves to make a difference as individuals in important global issues affecting their futures, such as climate chang...

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] The overarching goal of this paper is to illustrate the interplay between theory, design principles, and curriculum (meant broadly, to include both written and enacted curriculum). This dialogue is illustrated in the context of the design and implementatio...

Can science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to ‘teach the future’ through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules compris...

In this contribution, we focus on the tension between the traditional organization of school knowledge in disciplines and the STEM interdisciplinary skills required by society and labour market. We discuss the pros and cons of a disciplinary approach to knowledge so as to argue that disciplines can still play a relevant educational role, provided t...

The paper is framed within a broader research programme aimed at investigating how science education can enhance the formation of what we call future-scaffolding skills: the abilities to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon. To this end, we designed a module (targeted at s...

This paper aims to provide a contribution to the research in physics education regarding the interplay between mathematics and physics in teaching and learning physics at university level. The argument is developed through a study focused on the historical case study of the black body that led Planck to make one of the most significant scientific b...

The EU ERASMUS+ project I SEE (Inclusive STEM Education to Enhance the capacity to aspire and imagine future careers) stems from the awareness that one of the main challenges for mankind today, above all for the young, is to recover a good relationship with time, merely with the future. We live in a multi-speed society in which the capacity to pred...

This paper investigates how features of teaching practice may foster appropriation: learning that involves both deep conceptual understanding and transforming scientific discourse in a way that is significant for oneself. Data were drawn from classroom discussions during a unit on thermodynamics that took place in a high school in Italy. We analyze...

Global crises and societal uncertainty mean that youth perceive the future no longer as a promise but as a threat, and have difficulty projecting themselves into the future. Future studies and action competence pedagogies partly inform our EU-funded strategic partnership to develop teaching strategies and materials that build future-scaffolding ski...

Abstract: Global crises and societal uncertainty mean that youth perceive the future no longer as a promise but as a threat, and have difficulty projecting themselves into the future. Future studies and action competence pedagogies partly inform our EU-funded strategic partnership to develop teaching strategies and materials that build future-scaff...

In this talk we report selected results from a study on the processes of appropriation in students' learning of quantum physics, organized jointly by the universities of Bologna and Pavia. In the study, experimentations of learning paths on quantum physics were carried out in secondary school classes. The experimentations were based on different ed...

In the world where young people feel that the future is no longer a promise but a threat, and science and technology are sources of fears and global problems, a challenging task for education is to support students in imagining a future for the world and for themselves. The aim of the EU-funded project “I SEE” is to create an approach in science ed...

Pursuing both disciplinary authenticity and personal relevance in the teaching and learning of science in school generates tensions that should be acknowledged and resolved. This paper problematizes and explores the conceptualizations of these tensions by considering personal relevance, disciplinary authenticity, and common school science as three...

The issue of scientific citizenship in the context of STEM education has been under debate for over two decades. We present a preliminary study which aims to investigate if, how and why the development of hard scientific skills grounded in the discipline of complex systems (suitably simplified and adapted) may foster the development of citizenship...

Conceptual change, how conceptual understanding is transformed, has been investigated extensively since the 1970s. The field has now grown into a multifaceted, interdisciplinary effort with strands of research in cognitive and developmental psychology, education, educational psychology, and the learning sciences. Converging Perspectives on Conceptu...

In this paper, we report some results obtained in classroom implementations of Quantum Physics teaching proposals, carried out in different school contexts. In particular, we observed significant cases of students who did not accept quantum physics as a personally reliable and convincing description of physical reality-cases of 'non-acceptance'-, e...

The scientific citizenship issue has been debating, in the context of science education, for over two decades. The main goal of the studies in this research field is to find approaches that, focusing on scientific contents and methods, design innovative ways to turn scientific knowledge in citizenship skills. In the talk we present a preliminary st...

This paper focuses on results of an interview based survey of first-year university physics students, carried out within the EU Horizons in Physics Education (HOPE) project (http://hopenetwork.eu/). 94 interviews conducted in 13 universities have been analyzed to investigate the factors that inspire young people to study physics. In particular, the...

The scientific community has been debating climate change for over two decades. In the light of certain arguments put forward by the aforesaid community, the EU has recommended a set of innovative reforms to science teaching such as incorporating environmental issues into the scientific curriculum, thereby helping to make schools a place of civic e...

The EU funded IRRESISTIBLE-project (Project Coordinator: Jan Apotheker, University of Groningen, Netherlands) develop activities designed to foster the involvement of high school and elementary students and the public in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). In the project, awareness about RRI is raised in two ways: increasing content knowledg...

La enseñanza de la relatividad especial, tanto a nivel de escuela secundaria como de universidad, se encuentra aún fuertemente influenciada por el abordaje diseñado por Resnick en 1968. Este abordaje sigue, de alguna manera, la publicación original de Einstein de 1905 sobre “La Electrodinámica de los Cuerpos en Movimiento” y orienta, de manera más...

The paper provides an overview of the studies on teaching/learning special relativity carried out in physics education research. The purpose of the overview is to (i) show the main research strands or dimensions (namely, conceptual change, curriculum design and teacher education) on which the problem of improving teaching/learning of special relati...

The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identit...

In the last years a growing research concern, within physics education, has been addressed to the production of teaching proposals for introducing notions of quantum field theories (QFT) at the secondary school level. The proposals are usually the result of the effort of translating the most widespread approach to QFT in university textbooks, “cano...

The paper concerns the analysis of a successful classroom experience where secondary school students made evident progress in appropriating thermodynamics according to personal approaches. The main result of the analysis is the construction of a definition of appropriation which is operational in two senses: (i) it includes the indication of what o...

The big problems that contemporary society needs to address (e.g. climate change) challenge our traditional idea of education and require to revise the goals of science education research. Such problems are indeed so complex as to require a wide range of competencies to be engaged in producing and implementing solution strategies. Science education...

The paper deals with physics teaching/learning in high school. An investigation in three upper secondary school classes in Italy explored the reactions of students to a structuring lecture on optics within the discipline-culture (DC) framework that organises physics knowledge around four interrelated fundamental theories of light. The lecture prese...

The main goal of the study is to test teaching materials designed for making particle physics conceptually relevant for secondary school students. In designing the materials the concept of symmetry has been assumed as core-idea because of its structural and foundational role in particle physics, its crosscutting character and its epistemological an...

The scientific community has been debating climate change for at least twenty years. The EU has recommended a set of innovative reforms to science teaching, incorporating environmental issues in the scientific curriculum, answering the need for making school a place of civic education. This paper focuses on the presentation of materials designed to...

The paper discusses teaching materials on thermodynamics, designed and implemented in 5 classes of scientifically-oriented secondary schools in Italy (grade 12).

This paper examines the relationship between classroom discourse and a particular kind of learning, termed appropriation, that encompasses both the mastery of disciplinary content as well as situating one's learning in wide and personal projects of intellectual and emotional growth. Our analysis focuses on data collected during an extended teaching...

We address some problem related to teaching quantum field theory at the university level. After a discussion of the pros and cons of the canonical quantization approach, we present an alternative teaching proposal. The novelty of this approach rests on the idea of using a multilevel structure, where the levels of phenomenology, formalism and interp...

This paper aims at supporting the claim that some forms of hyper-simplification, by making physics seem easy, are at risk of dangerously distorting the content as well as the process of learning physics. The paper presents examples of dangerous simplifications in the teaching of quantum physics. Then, examples of productive forms of complexity are...

La sfida che la società della conoscenza ci pone è il personale coinvolgimento di chi apprende in un processo di innovazione, che coinvolge contenuti e metodi. La fisica moderna, la fisica in contesto e la didattica laboratoriale sono i cardini di questa innovazione nella didattica della fisica. Nel Progetto IDIFO4 del PLS 20 università e centri di...

Since 2005, the Italian Universities have promoted initiatives for school-university cooperation in the framework of a national project (PLS) to face the problems of a substantial scienti�c illiteracy in young people and a worrying decreasing interest in physics emerging from OCSE-PISA data. The project PLS is �nanced by the Ministry for Education...

This paper concerns an empirical study carried out with a group of high school physics teachers engaged in the Module on relativity of a Master course on the teaching of modern physics. The study is framed within the general research issue of how to promote innovation in school via teachers’ education and how to foster fruitful interactions between...

This article provides an empirical analysis of data collected during the implementation of a teaching proposal on thermodynamics in a class of 20 students (17 year-olds) of a scientifically-oriented secondary school in Italy. During the activities, each student made evident progress in gaining intellectual autonomy as they took part in the teaching...

This article provides an empirical analysis of a single classroom episode in which students reveal difficulties with the concept of proper time in special relativity but slowly make progress in improving their understanding. The theoretical framework used is “coordination class theory,” which is an evolving model of concepts and conceptual change....

Research in the history and philosophy of physics hasshown that the formalism of General Relativity can be interpreted in several different ways and,consequently, its teaching is very problematic. The present contribution is an example of a reconstruction of thedebate concerning the foundations of General Relativity on the basis of cultural and edu...

The geometrical interpretation of general relativity provides the formalism with intuitive imagery (Chandler 1994). Such an interpretation often presupposes a substantival space: a space taken to be a real entity whose existence is independent of the matter contained. Nowadays an image of space-container seems to have wide acceptance among physicis...

A research work aimed at producing materials for preservice teacher education in physics will be presented. The basic points of the work are: the core ideas of modern physics must be known by an educated citizen; physics must be taught as an intellectual production influenced by the general cultural climate and able to influence it; the materials h...

The paper illustrates results of a research project concerning an "educational re- construction" of modern physics (relativity and quantum physics). The research aims at re-shaping the current debates on Foundations, Philosophy and History of Physics in order to design intelligible and practicable routes along which secondary school students can be...

This paper deals with a study carried out with a group of high-school physics teachers engaged in a Master course on the teaching of modern physics (Master IDIFO, Progetto Lauree Scientifiche). The study allowed us to focus on the complexity of the process the teachers have to go through in order to master innovative proposals, to compare them with...

Introduction The contradiction between the dominant role of Science in Society and the growing disaffection of young people towards science subjects is nowadays evident and alarming. Many studies, among which the European investigations published by UNESCO (Sjøberg, 2002), show that disaffection towards Science, in particular Maths and Physics, is...