Mara Soncin

• Doctor of Engineering
• Professor (Assistant) at Politecnico di Milano

Recent evidence from the 2022 wave of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) sheds light on the phenomenon of learning loss exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Italy, having implemented one of the longest national school closures during the pandemic, serves as a notable case study. This chapter reviews studies exploring th...

With the COVID-19 pandemic, students around the world faced a disruption of unprecedented intensity. In Italy as in many other countries, for several months emergency remote teaching was the only possible form of schooling. The impacts of the COVID-19 on student achievement could be heterogeneous, depending notably on teachers’ digital instructiona...

Previous research highlighted the existence of multiple educational leadership styles; however, evidence on their multidimensional application is limited. The current study defines an innovative cross-national classification for school leaders along the two dimensions of instructional and distributed leadership. We apply a three-step Latent Class A...

The learning loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on students' outcomes is likely to have lasting effects on which evidence is lacking. Using a difference-indifferences design through a triple difference estimator, we identify the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on Italian students' test scores in the two years following the COVID-19 ou...

This paper investigates the heterogeneous impact of school closures during Covid-19 pandemic in Italy on academic performance across different schools, grades, subjects and groups of students. Our analysis utilises an innovative dataset that combines administrative data on standardised tests in grades 5 and 8 with a specifically-designed survey tha...

The Covid-19 pandemic coerced the closure of most schools around the world and forced teachers and students to change teaching and learning methods. Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) generated consequences to teachers and students in terms of learning outcomes and personal well-being. This study focuses on teachers’ individual and working environment...

This paper describes the results of an experiment conducted in a technical university in Italy in 2019, involving the implementation and evaluation of an innovative short course on financial education. The programme applied a novel approach based on online learning and its effectiveness is compared against the effects of a traditional on-campus lec...

Cet article adopte une approche quantitative et holistique pour élaborer un modèle d’e-maturité dans les administrations locales, défini comme la mesure dans laquelle les technologies imprègnent la prestation de services publics. En outre, l’étude apporte de nouvelles preuves quant aux performances associées à différents niveaux d’e-maturité. Pour...

The disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented situation, in which digital learning, in the form of Emergency Remote Teaching, was the only possible form of schooling. Italy soon decided to close schools as a measure to counter the spread of the virus. Although the Ministry of Education suggested general guidelines, schoo...

This paper investigates the determinants of mathematics performance by gender, exploiting a multilevel random forest approach. OECD PISA 2018 data from 28 European countries are employed to explore the performance of male and female students as a function of students’ family characteristics, their attitudes towards education, and class and school e...

Though many data on the experience of care of patients and caregivers are collected, they are rarely used to improve the quality of health care delivery. One of the main causes is the widespread struggle in interpreting and enhancing these data, requiring the introduction of new techniques to extract intelligible, meaningful, and actionable informa...

In an ever-changing world, having the right competences for the job market represents a key challenge for sustained employability. To address this need a growing number of digital platform for life long learning (LLL) has been developed. Anyway, it is less known how users navigate and use these platforms. The present study represents a one of the f...

With its combination of online and face-to-face interaction, blended learning is increasingly being employed in postgraduate education. To date, most empirical research on the topic has focused on the design and relative effectiveness of online versus in-person learning. Meanwhile, any exploration of the costs of its delivery has often been neglect...

Acknowledging the importance of financial literacy in modern societies, schools are implementing different activities to teach basic concepts to young pupils. This work aims at investigating the effectiveness of an intervention of financial education in an Italian high school, conducted during the period of school closure due to COVID-19. Through a...

Digital learning is challenging traditional higher education structures by enabling new strategic directions and entrepreneurial stimuli. The paper adopts the definition of intrapreneurship as the entrepreneurial orientation within existing organisations and explores that concept in the context of digital learning, focusing on Massive Open Online C...

Purpose This study aims to investigate the organisational structure to exploit data analytics in the educational sector. The paper proposes three different organisational configurations, which describe the connections among educational actors in a national system. The ultimate goal is to provide insights about alternative organisational settings fo...

Internationalisation is a major trend in higher education worldwide. Yet, little evidence is given on the net impact of international students on national economies. This study addresses this gap by estimating the benefits against the costs driven by international students in Belgium and its Flemish region in particular. Using a unique combination...

Internationalisation is a major trend in higher education worldwide. Yet, little evidence is given on the net impact of international students on national economies. This study addresses this gap by estimating the benefits against the costs driven by international students in Belgium and its Flemish region in particular. Using a unique combination...

In Italy, the provision of educational ancillary services (like meals and school transportation) is in charge of the municipalities. We investigate whether municipalities differ in their efficiency when providing these services and whether such heterogeneity explains some portion of the variability observed in pupils’ test scores. This paper is the...

This article undertakes a quantitative and holistic approach to frame a model of e-maturity in local governments, defined as the extent to which technologies permeate public service delivery. Moreover, the study adds evidence on the performance associated with different levels of e-maturity. In so doing, we collect survey data from 814 Italian loca...

The current study assesses the effect of using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with the specific goal of providing remedial education. The data refer to an Italian flagship university, Politecnico di Milano, where a MOOC platform was launched following the strategy ‘MOOCs to bridge the gaps’. Hence, the study aims at assessing the effect of stu...

The paper revisits the outbreak of Covid-19 in Italy and particularly in Lombardy region, the first and initially most severely affected area among western countries. First, we provide an overview of the impact of the pandemic in the country and in the region, mentioning the turning points and the main effects on the national and local economy. Sec...

The study explores how the COVID-19 outbreak prompted digital innovation in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) by providing evidence on the dimensions leveraged, the initiatives organised and the organisational results achieved. By means of an exploratory single case study based on a School of Management located in Northern Italy, the study propo...

I comuni italiani, al fine di migliorare la qualità del sistema scolastico, hanno la responsabilità di finanziare una serie di servizi complementari di istruzione, come i servizi di refezione e di trasporto degli alunni, nonché di manutenzione ordinaria e riscaldamento delle scuole dell'infanzia, primarie e secondarie di primo grado. In questo lavo...

In Italy, the provision of educational ancillary services (like meals and school transportation) is in charge of the municipalities. We investigate whether municipalities differ in their efficiency when providing these services and whether such heterogeneity explains some portion of the variability observed in pupils' test scores. The paper is the...

Purpose This research investigates the impact of managerial practices implemented by Italian school principals on students' outcomes, using micro-data provided by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) for 2013/14 school year. Design/methodology/approach Employing an educational production function, the authors regress a set of...

This paper examines how Performance Measurement Systems (PMSs) are implemented in local governments where the initial context is defined by equivalent external pressures and professional expertise, in order to address the question of “why” PMS implementation patterns differ from one setting to another. The study explored the reasons behind these di...

When investigating students’ motivations to enrol in university, a wide range of elements related to the overall student experience should be taken into account. The current study moves from this point to analyse students’ choice factors from a survey completed by 27,504 students across 23 Italian institutions by means of a logistic principal compo...

When investigating students’ motivations to enroll in university, a wide range of elements related to the overall student experience concerning both the institution and the surrounding context should be taken into account. The current study moves from this point to analyse students’ choice factors from a survey completed by 27,705 students across 2...

This study investigates the existence of various leadership types in a sample of lower secondary school principals across Italy (n = 1073). Information is obtained using a questionnaire about instructional practices and leadership perceptions administered by the National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI). Employing a latent class analysi...

This research investigates a particular category of disadvantaged students, namely those who are able to overcome their disadvantaged condition obtaining good academic results (here named “resilient students”). We use micro-data provided by the Italian National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) to focus on class and school-level characte...

This research investigates a particular category of disadvantaged students, namely those who are able to overcome their disadvantaged condition obtaining good academic results (here named “resilient students”). We use micro-data provided by the Italian National Evaluation Committee for Education (INVALSI) to focus on class and school-level characte...