Background:Italy is a country showing low math achievement, especially in the Southern regions. Moreover, national student assessments are recent and rigorous policy evaluation is lacking. This study presents the results of one of the first randomized controlled trials implemented in Italian...

This paper investigates the short-term effects on achievement, study behaviours and attitude of an intervention providing extra instruction time to students in lower secondary schools in southern Italy. We use a difference-in-differences strategy and compare two contiguous cohorts of students...

In recent years in Italy, there has been a fast increase in the number of young people graduating with a tertiary degree and a sharp change in the composition of this population by gender, social origins and the field of study. Since the middle of the 90s, we have also detected a growth in the...