L’avvio della ricerca empirica in campo educativo in Italia: il contributo di Calonghi e Visalberghi

The Start of Empirical Research in Education in Italy: The Contribution of Calonghi and VisalberghiWhile the dominant philosophy in Italy at the end of World War II was not favourable to pedagogical experimentation, some initiatives aiming to innovate – in the activist sense – contents and methods of school teaching represented the remote causes of the start of educational studies with the positive method. These initiatives facilitated the action of empirical research pioneers in the field of education, which developed in Italy in the 1950s for three main reasons: 1) the influence of experiments conducted in US schools, 2) the spreading of Dewey’s thought, 3) the impetus given by the Institute of Pedagogy of the Salesians to the study of educational sciences. Calonghi and Visalberghi were the first to promote and organize two lines of empirical research on educational facts which contributed to the full scientific recognition of Experimental Pedagogy and Docimology in the mid-1970s. In order to avoid technicalities, the researchers who use the experimental method feel the need to frame their specialized studies within a vast pedagogical horizon