May 16, 2025. 13:00h. In-person and Zoom session (Room M204, Faculty of Psychology and Speech Therapy). Language: English.

Christian Tarchi

University of Florence

In the present knowledge society, reading comprehension represents a key competence for lifelong learning and active citizenship. As our students are accessing the Internet at young ages, it is important for schools to empower them in becoming critical users of digital information. Surrounded as we are by information sources and complex texts, it becomes increasingly important to identify those sources that are relevant to our task and integrate relevant content across sources. In this talk, I will present the EMILE project, which aimed at empowering secondary school teachers and students in self-regulation of media and literacy processes. Funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in EMILE we developed a gamified approach to empower secondary school students and a teachers’ professional development model to empower teachers in critical online reading. In specific, the intervention was designed to support readers at different steps of the critical reading task: when planning, when selecting sources, when assessing source relevance, when identifying relevant snippets in the texts, when associating snippets across texts, when composing their written outputs. I will discuss the results of the experimental study conducted, the limitations and the “what-next”. During the talk, I will also focus on the project management components, to discuss how research has to lead to both experimental results and societal impact.

Bio

Christian Tarchi is an Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Florence. His research focuses on reading comprehension, critical thinking, and digital literacy, particularly how students evaluate and integrate information from multiple digital sources. He has led several European projects, including EMILE, which promotes self-regulated critical online reading, and ORWELL, centered on digital writing. He holds a PhD in Psychology and has published extensively on sourcing skills, epistemic cognition, and narrative development. His current work explores the connections between multi-text reading, epistemic beliefs, and theory of mind to support deeper, critical engagement with digital content.