RISULTATI RICERCA

The QATEK project is aimed at developing a quality oriented system of initial teacher education to increase teachers’ professionalism in Kosovo. This study aims to present and delve into one of the main outputs of the project, namely the course syllabus review process, carried out at partner universities in Kosovo based on the policy document developed in the project. Three focus groups were carried out with faculty members and university students in October 2023. The findings of the study illuminate the transformative impact of elevating professionalism through the course syllabus revision process within teacher education. The study underscores the importance of adopting a lifelong learning perspective for teachers’ professional development, positioning the syllabus revision process as a continuous and adaptive journey.

Research has shown that formative assessment can have large positive effects on student achievement, but the effects vary substantially and are not always positive. In addition, the underlying mechanisms responsible for the learning effects are not well understood. We present a framework developed to support research efforts to identify these mechanisms. The framework includes formative assessment processes as well as students’ learning processes, defines and exemplifies the term mechanisms in relevant contexts, indicates possible mechanisms, and identifies aspects that require further research to characterise and explain the mechanisms through which formative assessment affects student achievement. Finally, we exemplify how the framework may be used to design studies capable of providing the robust evidence required for drawing conclusions about the mechanisms.

The article focuses on a neglected chapter in the French reception of Kant: the debate on antinomies. Initially understood, by Victor Cousin’s eclecticism, as symbolizing the abstractness of the Kantian system, antinomies were the focus of cogent interpretations in the second half of the nineteenth century. The debate that arose following Charles Renouvier’s solution, based on the rejection of the mathematical notion of actual infinity, was intense, involving major philosophers of the time, such as François Evellin, Louis Couturat, Henri Bergson and Léon Brunschvicg. The stakes were decisive: the nature of reason, the relationship between philosophy and science, and the possibility of a positive metaphysics. The Author reconstructs and analyzes the various interpretations, showing how the debate on antinomies played a decisive role in the formation of French philosophy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In modern Western political thinking, the family does not feature in the relationship between individuals and the State. The article argues that it is Hobbes who made a decisive contribution to this circumstance by making individuals autonomous and denaturalizing the family. He enables individuals to rid themselves of paternal dominion and even reverses the traditional relationship between family and State. Family and State are both essentially artificial, and the first is based on the second. From this point of view, what Hobbes presents is a dynamic state of nature, which makes it possible to answer the criticism of patriarchal thinkers and today’s feminists. Furthermore, the article reveals the significance of Hobbes’s theory of the family for the formation of modern individuals and their political life.

The objective of the paper concerns the analysis of Keynesian thinking on economic policy from an institutional perspective, since Keynes ignores both institutions and the possibility that a modification of them might change the way expectations are formed. Specifically, the relationship between expectations and economic activity will be examined, taking into consideration the concept of an agent formulating expectations. It will be emphasised how an institutional orientation can help the application of Keynesian economic policies by setting aside individualistic and psychological principles, on which Keynesian thinking is based, and incorporating an institutional and historical examination of political and economic institutions into expectations. This represents an attempt to incorporate the institutional dimension into Keynesian doctrine to strengthen it, without placing the individual at the core of the analysis. For example, the issue of the rigidity of monetary wages highlighted by Keynes in chapter seventeen of the General Theory will be interpreted from an institutional perspective. Indeed, rigidities and customary practices are important in reducing uncertainty and promoting efficient decision-making. It is precisely on uncertainty that individuals acquire knowledge based on their involvement in social practices and observation of the habits that form the structure of social and economic life.

This note examines Ricardo’s views on absolute and relative value in terms of the labor theory of value. It discusses why Ricardo viewed the construction of a standard of value capable of measuring changes in the absolute value of commodities as critical to understanding the division of the national product among the main contending classes in a competitive capitalist economy. The paper also highlights the shortcomings of Ricardo’s proposed standard measure of value – one that would challenge and confound him all his life.

The paper aims to retrace the academic discourse on cryptocurrencies from 2015 to 2022 by treating it as a lexical unicum that evolves over time. The purpose is to understand what themes have emerged and how they have changed the discourse on cryptocurrencies. We used a three-step methodology. The first consists of text mining that allows us to create, from 1057 academic articles on the subject, the matrix containing the frequencies of words/n-grams. In a second step, lexical analysis is enriched by correspondence analysis, a useful tool to measure the "distance" and evolution of academic discourse and to identify significant content discontinuity. Finally, the causal analysis addresses the ultimate goal of understanding whether it is possible to define future developments in the cryptocurrency discourse, whether it will absorb instances from outside or remain focused on the prevailing themes to date. The identification and application of a method to analyze the evolution of the cryptocurrency discourse allowed us to distinguish at least two distinct phases characterized by specific content and cryptocurrencies.