The Education Department supports an energetic, dynamic, interdisciplinary research culture. We have strong and vibrant traditions of research informed teaching. There are a number of national and international research projects being led by our department this year.
Click below to read about our current projects and collaborations.
Maynooth University Department of Education
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Scaffolding the philosophical – examining how a pre-college philosophy curriculum supports teachers and students in taking a philosophical orientation toward the world.
Collaboration Title: Scaffolding the philosophical – examining how a pre-college philosophy curriculum supports teachers and students in taking a philosophical orientation toward the world.
MU Dept. of Education Staff Member and collaboration team: Joe Oyler (Maynooth University); Maughn Gregory (Montclair State University, USA); Megan Laverty (Teachers College, Columbia University, USA)
Short description of the collaboration:
For the past 50 years the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC) has worked to bring collaborative, philosophical dialogue and activities into mainstream classrooms around the world. The Community of Inquiry model of classroom discussion, advocated by the IAPC, has been widely adopted and systematically explored both within and beyond Philosophy for Children (P4C) approaches. Unfortunately, the curriculum developed and published by the IAPC to be used in parallel with discussion practices has received less scholarly attention. Furthermore, much of the attention the IAPC Instructional Manuals have received regularly equates their curricular design with those found in ‘thinking skills’ programmes which emerged in the 1980s and 90s, largely in the Anglo west. Our shared experience in working with these materials suggests they call upon teachers and students to engage in many other kinds of activities, including ones we feel are philosophical in educationally important ways.
We have taken the 50th anniversary of the IAPC as an opportunity to (re)capture the philosophical spirit of the pedagogical venture which is P4C through a systematic analysis of these manuals through the following research question: In what ways do the IAPC manuals invite teachers and students to take a philosophical approach to thinking and experience? Our study involves a qualitative investigation utilising both deductive and inductive analytic codes derived from the extant pedagogical literature and the curricular materials themselves. We hope the use of both inferential strategies will help clarify what conceptions of “philosophical” guided the initial development of the curriculum, and to (re)shape our understanding of how the materials can support a “philosophical orientation” in our contemporary educational contexts.
Using the Rational Force Model and AI to Improve the Assessment of Written Arguments in Elementary Language Arts Classrooms
Collaboration Title: Using the Rational Force Model and AI to Improve the Assessment of Written Arguments in Elementary Language Arts Classrooms
MU Dept. of Education Staff Member and collaboration team: Joe Oyler (Maynooth University); Alina Reznitskaya (Montclair State University, USA); Evgeny Chukharev (Iowa State University, USA); Ariel Sykes (Montclair State University, USA); Michele Flammia (Independent Researcher, Italy)
Funding: Multiple proposals under consideration
Short description of the collaboration:
Our interdisciplinary group seeks to advance our understanding and support of students as they navigate “epistemically complex” informational environments – marked by information overload and the widespread rise of misinformation (Ferretti, 2023; Kavanagh & Rich, 2018). Key to our work is the educational use and evaluation of argumentation dialogue.
As commonly used evaluation models often ignore important characteristics of student argumentation quality, phase one of our collaboration seeks to develop and validate an automated scoring system to assess the quality of arguments written by upper-elementary school students in language arts classrooms. We are drawing from an innovative, but largely overlooked, analytic framework called the Rational Force Model (RFM) (Naess, 1959) to evaluate the structure and the content of written arguments. We also seek to leverage advances in symbolic and neural AI to automate the scoring process.
In the future, we envision expanding the system to provide automated tutoring and integrating it into our previously developed curriculum, aimed at supporting argumentation development and dialogic teaching (Reznitskaya & Wilkinson, 2017; Wilkinson et al., 2023).
Responding to School Avoidance in Co Limerick
Project Title: Responding to School Avoidance in Co Limerick
MU Dept. of Education Staff Member and research team: Dr Catriona O’Toole - Principal Investigator
Funding: Limerick Children and Young Peoples Services Committee
Short description of the project:
An increasing number of young people are experiencing school attendance difficulties, the reasons for which are complex and multifaceted. This project involves focus group consultations with multiple key actors or ‘stakeholders’ in County Limerick (i.e., young people, parents, school staff, other allied professionals), to explore the lived realities of experiencing and/or responding to school attendance difficulties. The findings of these consultations are being use to develop agreed referral pathways for Co Limerick schools and agencies, as well as a suite of user-friendly resources for schools, parents, and students.
The project is led by Dr Catriona O’Toole, member of the Executive Committee of the International Network for School Attendance (INSA) and Founder of Trauma-informed Education, with research assistance from Tara Ciric, PhD candidate.
5*S: Space, Surveyors and Students - Phase 2
Project Title: 5*S: Space, Surveyors and Students - Phase 2 (0122/DP/10465)
MU Dept. of Education Staff Member and research team: Dr Zerrin Doganac Kucuk - Project Manager,
Angela Rickard - PI.
Funding: Science Foundation Ireland / Science Foundation Ireland
Short description of the project:
In Phase 1 of 5*S we measured teachers’ reactions to our school-outreach workshops questionnaires and interviews. Although valuable, this method did not include student voice. We now aim to include the students’ perspectives. This will help us to evaluate the impact of our workshops on advancing their knowledge of STEM and potential careers in STEM; explaining the role of satellite technology in addressing real world problems and their understanding of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We will advance the project by recording feedback from all students who participate in our workshops (both second level students and student teachers).
2 HPV Education powered by STEAM: Exploring peer-to-peer creative critical engagements
MU Dept. of Education Staff Member and research team: Dr Céline Healy, M.U. Department of Education, and Dr Iain Macdonald, M.U. Department of Design Innovation, co-lead this research project to find new ways to communicate and improve awareness and advocacy of Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccination.
Funding: The project is funded by Science Foundation Ireland and builds on their previous project which was funded by the Research Council of Ireland.
Short description of the project:
The project seeks to find new ways to communicate and improve Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccination awareness and advocacy, particularly in post-primary and primary schools. An important objective is to develop confident advocates for HPV immunisation who can create positive peer-to-peer narratives that can counter online misinformation aimed at pre/early teens and their parents/guardians.
It is a intersectoral, interdepartmental, international project involving Transition Year post-primary students, 6th class primary students, MU Dept of Education, MU Department of Design and Innovation, Edinburgh Napier University Departments of Design, Psychology, and Life Sciences, in collaboration with the Irish Cancer Society. It researches the use of STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts Maths) in promoting education on immunology and vaccination.
There are two phases to the study. The first involves volunteer Transition Year students from two Co. Offaly post-primary schools - St Mary’s Secondary School and Oaklands CC, Edenderry – and three Co. Kildare post-primary schools – Maynooth PP, Maynooth CS, and Salesian College Celbridge. The students attend three days of STEAM workshops at Maynooth University where they develop their understandings of immunology and vaccination, with particular reference to the HPV vaccine, through collaborative, creative arts-based approaches and through inputs from our on-team immunologist and the Cancer Society scientist.
The TY students create posters, dramas, videos and other artistic outputs to explore and express their learnings and understandings. Supported by the different discipline expertise in the team, they further develop these artistic outputs to make them suitable for heightening the awareness and understandings of 6th class pupils about the HPV vaccine which they will be offered in the first term of 1st year. Their presentations are developed and rehearsed in conjunction with the university team.
The TY students then visit their old primary schools to raise 6th class pupil awareness about HPV vaccination, using role-play, and with the aid of their videos and other artistic outputs. They are accompanied by members of the research team.
After the project is completed, we will put forward a selection of videos to be screened at the Science on Screen Film Festival in collaboration with NUI Galway Coram and at the NUI Galway ReelLIFE Science Competition. The Irish Cancer Society will use them in their outreach programme and they will also be used at the National Immunisation Agency screenings. The subsidiary objective is to increase the reach of the videos beyond school settings as a stimulus for discussion around immunology and vaccination, and to raise HPV vaccine awareness.
Funding stream: Science Foundation Ireland
From Left to Right: Dr Claire Kilty, Dr Carol Gray Brunton, Dr Céline Healy, Dr Eva Malone, Dr Iain Macdonald, Dr Richard Firth.
