The Centre for Educational Research (CIE-ISPA) is organized in 3 thematic lines: educational contexts and written language acquisition; emotional components of the educational processes; educational quality and differentiation and has the following main goals:

• Research into the child’s appropriation of written language processes in preschool and early school years, with the aim of developing intervention programs that allow for both the prevention of failure in the process of learning the written language, and the remediation when failure occurs;
• The study of emotional processes related to learning, in order to identify how the processes associated with these factors relate to behaviors that jeopardize successful schooling in order to facilitate prevention.
• The study of quality in educational contexts and environments and how they contribute to successful learning pathways, particularly in the case of people with special needs , as well as the study of the role of collaborative networks of educators ( e.g., teachers, parents ) and their effects at the individual and system levels.

Currently, CIE-ISPA has 46 members: 10 full members, 1 post-doctoral member, 27 PhD students, 5 of which have FCT scholarships, and 8 collaborators, which 1 is research assistant with a research grant. CIE-ISPA has two research projects financed by FCT and 2 intervention projects financed by other entities, one of which is European.