Against a backdrop of vast technological and societal changes, young people spend large portions of their lives in the digital world. Developing 21st century skills such as critical thinking needs to include specific competencies that enable young people to engage more critically in the online environment. The Critical Capacities Project was funded by the New Foundations fund from Research Ireland in 2025. The programme aims to support secondary school students to develop critical skills to engage confidently, safely and compassionately online. This new pilot programme provides an avenue for deeper understanding of key issues for young people within the digital space and seeks to learn how we can engage students in examining their digital world as participant and contributor with greater criticality and compassion.

As an action research study, the objective of this project was to design, deliver and evaluate a pilot programme for secondary school students. The study was guided by specific aims which were to improve digital and information literacies; provide opportunities for students to reflect on their online engagement; build critical skills to engage confidently and safely in a digital world and build skills to engage compassionately in a digital world.

Four pilot workshops were delivered to a group of fifteen students (aged 16-17 years) in a Dublin secondary school in 2025. The workshops were delivered with a specific themes (Engaging Safely Online; Engaging Critically Online; Engaging Compassionately Online and Mapping my Digital Identity) by a research team comprising the principal investigator and school teachers. The curriculum was designed with a specific teaching and learning approach that embedded a knowledge building element, a skills development element and a reflective element to prompt students to think about current uses and scope for positive actions. A range of research instruments were used to gather data comprising focus groups, feedback sheets and a researcher diary. Learning from the pilot will be used to further develop the programme with a view to future expanded delivery.

Findings from the pilot indicate gaps in the critical dimensions of students’ digital literacy coupled with a strong interest in learning how to protect their online safety and privacy. Students equally valued learning on how to evaluate information and sources more effectively and enjoyed questioning the norms and practices of the digital world particularly with regards to misinformation, bias and fact checking. Initial findings highlighted a consensus among students on the importance of empathy, perspective-taking and digital wellbeing but also a potential mismatch between beliefs and behaviours. Students’ feedback on the usefulness of the programme was positive but it is clear that a future iteration of this programme will require extended delivery time to enable students to complete practical elements and to participate more fully in the reflective and action-oriented aspects.

The aim of this presentation is to share the pilot programme innovations and learning with a view to opening up discussions on how we can meaningfully support students to engage more safely, critically and compassionately in the digital environment.

Keywords: Critical Thinking, 21st Century Skills, Digital Literacy, Digital Wellbeing.