Dr. Ann Devitt

Summary

The over-arching goal of this project is to use technology to improve the literacy skills of parents with literacy learning needs through a family digital literacy programme. This project will focus on parents in families with children in stages 1 and 2 of primary school (junior infants to second class). The specific literacy focus will be the constrained literacy skills which are key components of the Junior Primary Language Curriculum (NCCA, 2017). The over-arching goal will be addressed through the following research questions: 1. What are the individual and family literacy practices of families where a parent has literacy learning needs, in particular focusing on the uses of and access to technology? (See Work Package 2: Family digital literacy survey) 2. What technologies to support literacy are effective in developing constrained early literacy skills (e.g. letter knowledge, phonics)? (See Work Package 3: State of the Art Review in Technology to support early literacy) 3. Can these technologies, employed in a family literacy programme, support family literacy practices and develop the literacy skills of both parents and children? (See Work Packages 4 and 5 below to design and evaluate a family digital literacy module using an experimental research design)

Funding Agency

IRC

Programme

COALESCE

Project Type

Quasi-experimental study

Summary

The purpose of this project is to empower teachers to develop pedagogical competences for establishing effective and engaging learning experiences in a digital space, whether as part of a blended experience or wholly online. With the consortium partners from Ireland, Greece, Belgium and Spain, representing a mixture of second-level teachers and education researchers, we will address the common aim of harnessing UDL to achieve 'an EU-wide common understanding of how to make distance, online & blended learning effective, inclusive & engaging' (a strategic priority of the EC Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027). The project will address two key areas: inclusion and digital pedagogical competences, with the main target group being second-level teachers. The approach will be based on the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework (Cast.org), an inclusive approach to teaching and learning that offers all students an equal opportunity to fulfil their potential. This framework offers students different options for accessing, building and internalising learning. It guides teachers to provide multiple means for students to: a) engage with; b) represent; and c) action/express their learning. A key output of this project is to provide a digital overlay to the UDL framework to scaffold teachers' implementation of UDL principles in remote/blended contexts, such as during school closures. The other project outputs will flow from the development of this digital overlay, to provide further layers of supports for teachers to adopt digital learning principles of UDL. These include: a self-evaluation tool for teachers to identify aspects of the digital UDL framework with which they require support; an associated learning model to support teachers' creation of digital, UDL activities that include a focus on key skills and competences; Open Educational Resources to scaffold implementation of the framework; and a professional development module which will focus on Area 5 of the DigCompEdu Framework: empowering learners through accessibility and inclusion, differentiation and personalisation. These tools will aim to support teachers and schools to develop inclusive strategies for the digital provision of teaching and learning in their own educational context, with an overarching goal of ensuring high levels of student engagement notwithstanding the mode of content delivery.

Funding Agency

EU

Programme

Erasmus+

Summary

This project assumes a view of assessment that is embedded and integral to teaching and learning and where assessment data is used by both staff and students to progress learning towards learning goals that are explicit and shared. It will focus on assessment as a measurement and record of learning, ultimately for accreditation (summative) as well as assessment as a tool for both teachers and students to evaluate and progress learning (assessment for learning). Assessment as learning focuses on the student as an actor in the assessment process, setting success criteria, peer and self-assessing, and using these activities to progress their learning. The Digital Roadmap identifies a clear need to prioritise the development of high-impact and best practices within the learning environment 'that leverage the potential of digital technologies to support student learning and substantially contribute to evidencing pedagogical excellence'. (Digital Roadmap, p49). Technology offers great potential in the area of assessment, opening opportunities for experiential learning, collaborative learning, speedy or instant feedback and among a range of possible affordances. However, the reality of incorporating technology into institutional structures and of transforming pedagogical practice to embrace the possibilities of technology can be fraught with difficulty. The aim of this project is to conduct a systematic literature review and meta-analysis to synthesize and summarize previous literature and to identify best and next practices through a depth of understanding of prior research in this domain. Incorporating both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. This will provide a holistic overview of research findings, generating a solid evidence base for professional transformation in this domain.

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Programme

Research for Policy and Society Project Awards: National Forum for Teaching and Learning

Person Months

12

Summary

This project is a computational corpus analysis of semantic connectivity in general language and second language learner data to explore the hypothesis that Small World Network (SWN) properties that hold in lexical knowledge bases are not just an artefact of language representations but may be a causal factor in second language acquisition. Research has shown that humans are highly sensitive to distributional properties of language data and that this impacts on language acquisition. This will be the first systematic corpus analysis of second language acquisition data which focuses on semantic connectivity, leveraging the powerful distributional regularities of SWNs, and has the potential to open a new dimension in the field of language acquisition.

Funding Agency

Fulbright Commission

Programme

TechImpact Award

Person Months

6

Summary

Threshold Concepts (TCs) have emerged over the last ten years as a useful metaphor and tool for curriculum design and research with work conducted in higher education settings. TCs are defined as those without which it is not possible to engage in the practices and discourse of a discipline, in this case language teaching. This project aims to identify threshold concepts for language teacher education and the conditions that facilitate the learning of these concepts. The project incorporates the voice of professionals in the field articulating key moments of learning in their careers and the voice of the student teacher articulating their learning over the course of their initial teacher education programmes. The project aims to draw on the broad experience of language teachers North and South to identify threshold concepts for language teaching and to examine the degree and manner of integration of threshold concepts within ITE programmes North and South.

Funding Agency

SCoTENS