CRITICAL project
CRITICAL project aims at supporting children’s and adolescents’ (aged 10–19) critical reading skills. The aim is to support the important work of families, teachers, teacher educators, and librarians in supporting the critical reading skills of the younger generation. The project develops innovative learning solutions to enhance critical reading skills of children and adolescents. The research supports curriculum developers, educators, and policy makers to make decisions that provide equal opportunities to all adolescents to reach adequate critical reading skills for their future.
Critical is a collaborative project between Tampere University, University of Jyväskylä, University of Helsinki and University of Oulu.
Funding: Strategic Research Council (Oct. 2020–Sept. 2026, No. 335625, 358250)
Project website: https://educritical.fi/en/
Emile project
The Empowering schools in self-regulation of Media and Information Literacy processes (EMILE) project aims to expand the reach of media literacy by providing a cross-disciplinary professional development to support teachers’ competence in media literacy. It also aims to support adolescents’ media literacy skills by empowering their cognitive skills through gamified solutions. In the project. Emile is a collaborative project involving University of Florence, Romanian-American University, and Tampere University.
EduLit researchers develop teacher professional development and create materials to support teachers in educating critical online readers.
Funding: EmiFund (Jan. 2023–June 2024)
Emile website: https://www.emile.unifi.it/
The Educating Critical Online Readers
The project aims at
1) develop and validate an assessment that measures students’ skills to critically evaluate online texts;
2) develop and test the efficiency of two instructional programs that are targeted to enhance students’ ability to critically evaluate online texts;
3) understand the role of motivational factors in learning critical evaluation skills, and
4) understand whether there are gender differences in how students benefit from the motivational components that are incorporated into instruction.
Funding: Academy Research Fellow project awarded to Carita Kiili and funded by the Academy of Finland (No. 324524; Sept. 1, 2019–Aug.31, 2024).