Antonella D'Amico

Internet Addiction Disorder: An Italian Study

The Italian version of the Youngs Internet Addiction Test (IAT) was administered online to a sample of Italian chatters (n = 236) who were different in terms of gender, age, and occupation. Results revealed that young users are more at-risk subjects for Internet addiction than adults, perceiving a compromised social and individual quality of their life that led them to make a compensatory usage of the Internet. Similarly, employed users perceive their social and individual quality of life as more compromised by the Internet than students. Moreover, subjects who declared spending much time online obtained IAT scores higher than others in all the IAT subscales. Finally, nightly users are more at-risk subjects for developing an Internet addiction disorder, diminishing their individual quality of life and disabling their time control.

RELATIONS AMONG PERCEIVED SELF-EFFICACY, SELF-ESTEEM, AND SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT

The present research explored empirically the factorial dimensions of self-efficacy and self-esteem and associations among self-esteem, self-efficacy, and scholastic achievement as measured in 151 subjects (M age=13.4 yr.). Five factors emerged from factorial analysis: two factors reflected the self-esteem feelings (and were, respectively, named as self-referential self-esteem and comparative self-esteem). The remaining three factors reflected the self-efficacy beliefs in the three different scholastic domains considered, linguistic-literary, logical-mathematical, and technical-practical All self-efficacy scores were significantly correlated with scholastic achievement while no associations between self-esteem scores and scholastic performance were found. Nevertheless, self-efficacy and self-esteem dimensions shared some common aspects. In particular, each different self-esteem factor showed different magnitudes of association with domain-specific self-efficacy beliefs.

New frontiers for psychology and education: robotics.

The paper reviews the first attempts to study the educational and psychological usefulness of robotics: (1) the social and cooperative dimensions involved in the robot-building activities; (2) the reasoning strategies implied in building and programming robots; (3) the influences of robotics on mathematical and scientific achievement; (4) the use of robotics in modification of social skills of autistic children.

Cognitive and metacognitive processes involved in arithmetic problem solving: the software "Solving Arithmetic Problems"

Sommario Il presente contributo esamina la letteratura relativa al problem solving matematico ed illustra uno strumento multimediale per la soluzione dei problemi aritmetici in bambini del secondo ciclo della scuola primaria e in bambini che presentano difficolta in tale area. Il software presenta sia un modulo test, in cui vengono presentati problemi aritmetici di livello di difficolta crescente, che un modulo di training. Il training e stato elaborato in base alle piu recenti ricerche nell’area del problem solving matematico e prevede attivita sulla comprensione, rappresentazione, categorizzazione e pianificazione del problema. Il training prevede inoltre particolari attivita che stimolano l’uso della memoria di lavoro nella soluzione dei problemi. Il training si presenta come metacognitivamente orientato, in quanto i personaggi guida dell’ambientazione si configurano come “compagni di studio” che stimolano la riflessione metacognitiva rispetto alle attivita affrontate. PAROLE CHIAVE Problem solving matematico, problem solving aritmetico, training, metacognizione, memoria di lavoro.