Education and Development

Education and Development Research Group

The research expertise of our Education and Development Research Group is broadly situated in educational and developmental psychology, but with some insights drawn from cognitive science. We have specific expertise in developmental perspectives related to human learning across the lifespan. We are especially interested in topics such as language development, reading and wellbeing, literacy development, early perception and social interaction and the relationship between arts-based activities and learning

Much of our research is done in partnership with organisations including schools, local and national charities and policy groups. For example, one of our recent partners includes the UN Interdisciplinary and Intergovernmental Panel of Behaviour Change for Sustainable Development (IPBC).

Members

Dr Nicola Currie (Research Group Coordinator)

Nicola is a Lecturer in Psychology, with an interest in cognitive and affective aspects of reading. Her research investigates the development of reading comprehension skills in children, for example by examining how children use language and cognitive skills to help them make sense of text. She is also exploring how reading supports wellbeing, from childhood through to older adulthood. Nicola has recently worked with library and literacy organisations to share the powerful effects that reading can have on wellbeing, across the lifespan.

Dr Rebecca Frost

Rebecca is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, with expertise in cognition and child development. Her research investigates the cognitive mechanisms that support language acquisition and examines the way that these develop in children. She is particularly interested in the way that learners draw on patterns of information in the world around them during learning. She is also interested in the way that learning is supported by sleep. Rebecca obtained her PhD from Lancaster University in 2014 and worked as a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Netherlands) before joining Edge Hill University in 2021.

Dr Laura McGuire

Laura is a Lecturer in Psychology. A major strand of Laura’s research examines how education shapes values, attitudes, and behaviours across various domains, with a particular focus on climate change. She is interested in evaluating the effectiveness of different educational approaches and in designing new initiatives (arts-based, education-based, or integrated arts-and-education programmes) to understand how they influence both implicit and explicit attitudes, as well as behaviour. Her work considers both the immediate impact of these initiatives, as well as their longer-term effects on how individuals think and act.

<strong>Dr Priscilla Martinez-Cedillo</strong>

Priscilla is a Lecturer in Development and clinical psychology. Her research investigates how infants, children, and adults (including those with ADHD, autism, and callous-unemotional traits) attend to and interpret the social world. By combining eye-tracking, wearable sensors, and naturalistic paradigms, her work examines how everyday experiences shape attention, perception, and social interaction. Her broader research vision seeks to advance inclusive, community-centred, and cross-cultural approaches to studying neurodiversity.

Madhi Moazzen

Madhi is a PhD research student in Psychology, exploring the effect of teacher’s messages on student’s maths engagement and achievement. His research interests relate to how students’ perceptions of different aspects of school life affect their performance and outcomes. He is especially interested in how students perceive teachers’ messages in the classroom, whether motivational orientation affects their perceptions and how this in turn, affects their academic performance.

Dr Sarah Wu

Sarah is a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology. Her research investigates how children and adults learn and develop a range of language skills, including reading, comprehension, and production. In particular, her work examines the cognitive mechanisms that support the development of comprehension and production abilities in children, adolescents and adults. She also explores how language biases emerge during childhood and how sleep-related consolidation supports language learning. Her research combines behavioural and eye-tracking methods, adopting developmental and individual-difference approaches. Ultimately, her work aims to advance understanding of how language and communicative skills are acquired and refined across development.

Featured projects

The Psychology department at Edge Hill has a dedicated space for developmental research with children. In the Edge Hill Developmental lab, we believe that research should be engaging and enjoyable for everyone involved. We design our studies to be as fun and interactive as possible, so children and families can have a positive experience while contributing to science.

Our projects take place both in the lab and in community settings such as local schools, exploring how children, young people and adults think, learn, interact and experience the world around them.
Below you’ll find an overview of some of our current studies; each helping us understand different aspects of attention, learning, literacy and social development.

Attention to Socially Relevant Stimuli

Recruitment for this study will begin in 2026. We will be inviting infants aged 3, 6, 9, and 12 months to take part. In this project, we explore how babies pay attention to social interactions by showing them short videos of people engaged in conversation. By tracking their eye movements, we aim to understand how infants’ attention to social cues develops over the first year of life.

Eye-Hand Span

This project investigates how visual attention and motor coordination work together during task performance. We are particularly interested in how cognitive load, how mentally demanding a task is; affects the timing and coordination of eye movements and hand actions. These findings will help us understand how goal-directed behaviour develops and adapts in different contexts.

Cognitive Profiles in Adolescence

In this study, we examine how adolescents identify and process emotions while completing an online cognitive task. We explore how differences in traits such as inattention and behavioural style shape their cognitive profiles. The goal is to better understand the diversity of cognitive functioning during this critical developmental period.

Our Facilities

Get involved

There are various ways you can get involved in our Education and Development research

Research volunteer

Take part as a Research Volunteer as part of our Research Participation Scheme

Research intern

If you’re a current student, you may be eligible to be a paid research intern

MRes or PhD

Apply for a MRes or PhD in Education and Learning

Contact

If you would like to find out more about our Education and Development Research group, please get in touch with the group coordinator

Dr Nicola Currie

[email protected]