This study examines the impact of information dissemination on undergraduate enrollment rates, specifically focusing on awareness of the financial aid program among secondary school students. Previous research by IRES Piemonte revealed that a large proportion of first-time tertiary education entrants in Piedmont universities fail to apply for student grants, despite meeting eligibility requirements. We hypothesize that this is likely due to a lack of awareness of the financial aid opportunities available.

Student grants in Italy, on paper, are the primary means in removing economic barriers for low-income students to afford higher education. In reality, there is an inadequate dissemination of information with stakeholders which constitutes a significant flaw in implementation.

The primary objectives of this study are to evaluate the current level of students’ understanding of the grant scheme and to investigate whether raising awareness of the financial aid available influences their decision to enrol in higher education.

Initial interviews were conducted with 6,500 randomly selected high school seniors in Piedmont. The results confirmed a disparity between students’ professed familiarity with the grant and their actual knowledge. Despite 95% claiming to be aware of the grant, only 6% could accurately identify the eligibility requirements, and a scant 9% knew the grant organizers (EDISU Piemonte). A significant correlation between grant knowledge and student characteristics, such as gender, grade point average, school type, family background, and participation in guidance activities, was also observed.

The students were then randomized into treatment and control groups. The treatment group attended a 30-minute meeting providing detailed information about the grant, including eligibility requirements, application procedures, and award amounts, while the control group received no information.

A follow-up interview, conducted approximately six to seven months post-high school graduation, assessed university enrollment and grant application figures. A comparison of rates between the treatment and control groups aimed to determine the impact of participation in the informational meeting on undergraduate enrollment rates.

Our findings will contribute to understanding the influence of grant information on students’ transitions from high school to university, as well as on their decisions to apply for a study grant. We may also be able to identify the specific profiles of those students who would stand to benefit most from receiving this information.

Teachers’ guidance advice towards upper secondary school seems to contribute educational inequalities reproduction, being biased according to students’ socio-economic background^1,4,6. Previous quantitative studies have studied robust associations between advice and ascriptive characteristics, even net of student performance, but they tell us only few about underlying factors²; while qualitative studies investigate local contexts highlighting the formulation processes, exploiting only partially the existing variability⁶. All previous studies did not properly face the issue of causality or translate results into remedial intervention.

The aim of this study is twofold: i. causally investigating the magnitude of teachers’ biases in formulating guidance advice for students with different social background; ii. causally test whether raising teachers’ awareness about this bias and their role in inequalities reproduction may reduce disparities among students.

In order to pursue the first aim, we implemented a factorial survey experiment with which we assessed teachers’ bias on a large (non random) sample of 2,609 teachers at the beginning of the school year, in an on line survey, allowing simulated students characteristics to randomly rotate.

To assess whether teachers’ bias may be reduced raising teachers’ awareness, second aim of the paper, we implemented on the same sample of teachers (196 schools) a randomized controlled trial combined with the factorial survey named above, repeated before and after a teachers’ professional development intervention.

The treatment, developed starting from previous works by Alesina et al. (2018)¹ and Argentin & Gerosa (2022)², consisted of an online light touch training in October and November 2021 aimed at: i) making the teachers called to formulate guidance advice aware of the inequalities reproduction process at stake; ii) provide some recommendations to neutralize these processes.

Our results are promising. The factorial survey showed that teachers’ guidance is strongly affected by students’ social background. Lyceum is less recommended to pupils from lower parental social classes (minus 20 percentage points, comparing working to service class).

About the RCT, the information treatment generated among teachers a reduction in the bias in the advice, as estimated in simulated behaviour: the difference in recommending a lyceum to children of working class compared to service one reduced to 15 percentage points among treatment group teachers and raised to 26 among the controls.

About real world effects, the effects are more diluted. We find a similar trend in guidance advice provided to students by teachers and in upper secondary school enrollment. The difference in the advices’ formulation seems to go in the expected direction with a reduction in the bias by family’s education and social classes. Similarly, we find the same tendency for actual enrollments in upper secondary school: in the treatment group, there is a decrease in enrollments in lyceum among students from the service class, especially in the scientific subtrack, meanwhile more enrollments in the vocational or technical track. Additionally, there is an increase in enrollments from the most disadvantaged classes to technical despite tracks.

Conclusions will be drawn on the relevance of teachers' awareness for future actions to counteract social inequalities in education.

Education practices and policies should be informed by the best available scientific evidence (EC 2017; 2022). Following this principle, countries worldwide have begun encouraging evidence use in school education, whereas Italy appears to be a step behind due to a shortage in the connection between research, practice, and policy, along with a lack of impact evaluations on programs effectiveness (Pellegrini & Vivanet, 2020).

Fondazione per la Scuola of Compagnia di San Paolo (FpS) is an organisation based in the north of Italy that promotes quality and inclusive education at primary and secondary level. For all the reasons described above, paired with its unique outreach and cooperation with schools, decided to become a research organisation and create a research unit dedicated to guiding its initiatives through investments in applied research and rigorous impact evaluations (FpS, 2024a).

In this context, in line with recent developments at European (Council of the EU, 2004; 2008) and national level (MIM, 2022), FpS started focusing its attention on educational guidance, considered as a powerful tool to support and promote everyone social, emotional and cognitive development.

The growing level of interest and action on educational guidance arises from a specific research project that FpS is carring out in collaboration with University of Perugia which introduced, with extraordinary results, the practice of reading aloud in a school characterized by a significant presence of young people with migrant background. The research, now in its third year, has captured the school community’s interest and highlighted the impact that reading aloud has on individuals' cognitive, social and emotional skills with consequent internal and external benefits to the education and training system. In this sense, reading aloud turns out to be a powerful tool of empowerment and, when practiced on a regular basis with certain characteristics, it can be a tool for educational guidance by positively influencing students' ability to participate, make decisions, imagine and plan their own future.

Considering the results of the research and the relevance of the topic, more than a year ago, FpS activated a participatory process that involved different stakeholders at policy, practice and research level in a discussion aimed at disseminating a new culture on educational guidance. The process is still ongoing but giving relevant outcomes which have resulted so far in:

• A collective book describing school guidance in Italy and aiming to support school headmasters, teachers, educators and families in creating and leading experiences of educational guidance that are meaningful for the youngest (Guglielmini & Batini, 2023);
• The publication of a manifesto that explains the vision of FpS on educational guidance: five underlining principles will guide its interventions and research activities to promote a change in the way educational guidance is perceived and practised at school level (FpS, 2024b).

Work is still ongoing through a working group at local level engaging a wide range of organisations and institutions meeting regularly to discuss present and future actions as well as desired long-term goals to be achieved through a common theory of change.

Social disparities in educational decision-making (i.e. secondary effects) are a well-known factor in the intergenerational reproduction of inequality. A recent stream of experimental research points to the equalizing potential of information and counseling treatments designed to address many of the micro-level mechanisms underlying secondary effects, such as information gaps, parental influence, and over/under confidence in one’s own abilities. In the real world, however, school guidance professionals may find that reducing inequality conflicts with the selective and allocative functions of guidance. Moreover, similar to teachers, they may exhibit social biases in their assessments and recommendations. Another source of skepticism about the equalizing potential of guidance programs stems from the stickiness of educational expectations and the associated lack of responsiveness to (unwanted) signals about one’s academic potential.

Against this background, we focus on Italy as an exemplary case of a highly stratified tracking system that nevertheless leaves ample room for choice to students and their families. Not surprisingly, secondary effects are large in Italy by international standards, with long-term consequences for social inequalities in educational and occupational chances. By exploiting a unique longitudinal administrative dataset from the city of Turin (N=6,759), we unpack the decision-making process of students from different family backgrounds by examining how initial track intentions evolve into actual track choices and the role of school guidance in this process.

Our results show that track recommendations – which, in our context, are jointly developed by teachers and counselors – are not overtly biased in favor of high-SES students. However, the reluctance to recommend academic tracks unless students have a strong school performance and express an explicit wish for it disproportionately holds back academically promising low-SES students. At the same time, resistance to unwanted recommendations is higher among high-SES students. We conclude that the combination of restraining guidance and free-choice tracking provides an institutional legitimacy to inequalities in track choices.

Non-cognitive skills (NCS) refer to a set of attitudes, strategies, and behaviours, such as motivation, personality, and self-control, that support individuals in school and work settings^1-2. A wide range of studies indicate that NCS predict numerous educational outcomes from early childhood onwards, including school achievement in different disciplines as well as school choice^3-4. However, the consistency and generalizability of associations between NCS and achievement vary widely^5-6. We need to better understand the implications of school-based NCS to guide evidence-based interventions for school transitions. Here, we studied the discriminating ability of different NCS to differentiate Italian eighth-grade students from two consecutive cohorts in a national standardised test conducted by the National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI).

We collected data from two consecutive cohorts of eighth-grade students in the school years 2021/2022 (n=211) and 2022/2023 (n=253) from four secondary schools in the Turin metropolitan area. During the first semester, students completed a self-reported online questionnaire that included general socio-demographic information and NCS: behavioural and emotional affection and disaffection in school; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to study; mastery-based approach to study; perseverance and grit; resilience. At the end of each school year, we anonymously combined questionnaire data with past (i.e. second grade) and more recent (i.e. eighth grade) individual results in the INVALSI national standardised tests in Italian and Mathematics. Linear regressions with robust cluster error (students grouped into classes) examined how NCS predicted performance in Italian and Mathematics controlling for gender, nationality, socio-economic status (SES) and second grade performance. We ran a separate regression model for each NCS measure (ten in total) to assess for each the significant association with performance in Italian and Mathematics and the percentage of variance explained after accounting for all control factors.

The two cohorts did not differ significantly in terms of gender, nationality, or SES composition. There were also no significant differences between the two cohorts in Italian and Mathematics performances or NCS. Associations between NCS and performance varied considerably across different NCS indicators, test subject and cohorts, although we also found consistent results. Behavioural engagement had the strongest association with Italian and Mathematics performance in the 2021/2022 (Italian: B=11.52, SE=2.87, 95%CI=5.51–17.52, p=0.001; Mathematics: B=16.91, SE=2.92, 95%CI=10.80–23.01, p<0.001) and 2022/2023 cohort (Italian: B=13.27, SE=2.16, 95%CI=8.77–17.11, p<0.001; Mathematics: B=19.86, SE=2.64, 95%CI=14.37–25.35, p<0.001), while emotional disaffection was the only NCS indicators with no significant associations (p<0.05) with test performances in any cohort. On average, NCS explained 2% (range=0–5%) of the variance in the Italian and Mathematics test scores of the 2021/2022 students, while the average variance explained was higher for the 2022/2023 cohort: 3% (range=0–6%) in Italian and 5% (range=0–11%) in Mathematics.

We will discuss this heterogeneity of associations between NCS and educational outcomes within the debate on how we can harness NCS to assist students during key educational transitions, such as between lower and upper secondary education, to ultimately guide them to the best educational path in line with their aspirations, interests, and potential.

Literature shows how guidance interventions can and do make a difference in terms of “soft” skills such as creativity, problem solving, teamwork and decision-making competences that can be seen as precursors or proxy indicators that make a significant contribution to longer term socio-economic outcomes (Hughes, 2009). Starting from an in-depth analysis of the most widespread definitions of guidance - used in Europe and other geographical contexts - provided in different educational and training settings, an extensive body of research evidence was carried out that endeavours to demonstrate how to analyse and to report on the impact of guidance interventions and how to deal and to focus on evidence-base for guidance policies and systems developments (ELGPN, 2015). Based on the already explored domains of guidance, a literature review was carried out with the aim to get informed about new designs and developments of evidence and quality of career and guidance-related interventions. The work was situated within the devolved theories about quality assurance (Plant, 2004; 2012) and indicators (Hooley, 2014) for effective career guidance provision. The study focused primarily, though not exclusively, upon research findings from career and guidance-related interventions aimed at identifying, gathering and analysing quality assurance mechanisms and evaluation procedures of different guidance services. Accordingly, the paper will focus on the lessons learned from the research findings designed to inform and consolidate professionals’ understanding and articulation of what constitutes effective guidance-related interventions, as well as identifying gaps in the evidence-base for measuring and assessing the impact of guidance provision in Europe. As a main result, the research outcomes will show how it is difficult to measure and quantify in “precise terms” the impact that these interventions have on people’s intermediate and longer-term lifelong learning, training and employability as well as social and/or economic outcomes. But, as scholars like Hughes (2009) stated “measuring and assessing the impact of careers and guidance-related interventions is not simply about measurement; it is more about (…) building a learning community that has a strong and confident multi-dimensional voice that responds well to the pressure from policymakers and consumers to deliver more relevant and cost-effective interventions”.

In the context of a profound reevaluation of the role of schooling within the contemporary educational landscape, there is a growing emphasis on redesigning learning environments to enhance learning processes effectively (OECD, 2017; Paniagua & Istance, 2018). This study investigates the influence of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) on students' inclination to engage in problem solving task and its potential impact on intrinsic motivation for learning (Barrows & Tamblyn, 1980). Evidence-Based Education underscores the multifaceted impact of educational practices on learning outcomes, including motivational aspects, and emphasizes the importance of cultivating flexibility in instructional methods to better address learner needs and optimize learning outcomes (Fisher, 2016; OECD, 2017). Recent research has shown that engagement in Problem-Based Learning (PBL) activities positively influences students' attitudes towards problem solving, fostering traits such as openness, persistence, and a willingness to embrace challenges (Dolmans et al., 2016; Tsai & Tang, 2017; Tursynkulova et al., 2023). The development of students' skills is intricately linked to motivational factors such as interest, self-beliefs, and goal orientations, as supported by contemporary research (Elliot et, al., 2018). These motivational dimensions are widely acknowledged as fundamental drivers that significantly influence the acquisition and refinement of competencies across diverse educational contexts (Ryan & Deci, 2000; 2017). This heightened problem-solving openness, in conjunction with intrinsic motivation, creates a synergistic effect that sustains students' long-term commitment to learning and personal growth. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Evidence-Based Education and the OECD-PISA findings, a quasi-experimental design with a mixed-method approach was adopted to explore the relationship between engagement in PBL activities, problem-solving willingness, and intrinsic motivation among secondary school students. Quantitative data were collected from 108 students, before and after the implementation of PBL, using self-reported metrics from OECD-PISA (2014) to assess problem solving willingness and the Academic Motivational Scale (Alivernini & Lucidi, 2008). Results reveal a significant positive correlation between intrinsic motivation and students' problem-solving openness, which improved after exposure to PBL activities. Qualitative findings from open-ended questions complement these results by shedding light on the mechanisms through which PBL fosters students' willingness to engage in problem solving. The findings underscore the importance of integrating PBL methodologies into educational curricula to prepare students for the demands of the twenty-first-century workforce, where adaptability and innovative problem-solving skills are increasingly valued. Furthermore, the observed positive correlation between students' intrinsic motivation and openness to problem-solving tasks, enhanced through engagement in PBL activities, suggests a potential long-term impact on students' intrinsic motivation for learning. Thus, working with PBL may significantly and positively influence students' problem-solving skill and intrinsic motivation for learning, ultimately enhancing their lifelong learning perspective.