RAPID: Collaborative Research: A "Citizen Science" approach to COVID-19 social distancing effects on children's language development

COVID-19大流行对大量儿童的学习和语言发展构成重大威胁。对于那些面临社会和经济逆境的人来说，这些挑战更加复杂，这些因素与父母互动减少、儿童发展和学校成绩有关。本研究通过让家庭作为“公民科学家”参与进来，在危机期间跟踪孩子的语言使用情况，考察了covid - 19大流行对学习影响的范围和程度。社会疏远政策因州而异，使研究人员能够比较这些不同的决定如何影响儿童的语言发展。这将有助于政策制定者和教育工作者在危机管理和减轻危机相关政策负面影响的战略方面做出更明智的决定。更广泛地说，这项工作将对语言学习科学做出重要贡献，这反过来将帮助临床医生和教育工作者最好地解决来自不同人口统计数据的儿童的需求。最后，通过使用公民科学范式，该项目建立了科学推广和教育的渠道。该项目将招募数千名“志愿研究人员”，通过笔记本电脑或移动电话访问一个基于网络的应用程序，记录他们自己的家庭环境、亲子对话和儿童语言发展的数据。除了收集调查回复外，这款应用还能让父母为孩子的演讲制作简短的录音，并建立一个随时间发展的语言能力剪贴簿。当与综合招聘相结合时，该平台将收集广泛而深入的语音样本，并将支持更准确的儿童学习与长期逆境与短期逆境之间关系的模型。此外，不同地区社会中断的不同时间允许在家庭之间和家庭内部比较COVID-19的影响，并产生影响大小和种族和社会经济地位调节的估计。这些数据将解决社会迫切关注的问题，包括a) COVID-19政策如何影响语言学习环境；B)家庭压力如何改变儿童的语言和沟通行为；c) COVID-19危机对发展成果的影响。此外，由于社会动乱影响到广泛的人口，而且在很大程度上不受家庭控制，本项目利用COVID-19危机作为对社会和经济逆境的异常干净的操纵。这避免了现有研究中一直存在的问题，并将加深对影响儿童语言学习因素的理论认识。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The COVID-19 pandemic is a significant threat to learning and language development for large numbers of children. Such challenges are compounded for those facing social and economic adversity, factors that are associated with decreased parental interactions, child development, and school achievement. This study examines the scope and magnitude of learning impacts from COVID19 pandemic by engaging families as “Citizen Scientists” who will track their children’s language use during the crisis. Social-distancing policies vary by state, enabling the researchers to compare how these different decisions affect children’s language development. This will help policymakers and educators make more informed decisions, both about crisis management and strategies to mitigate negative effects of crisis-related policies. More broadly, this work will make important contributions to the science of language learning, which in turn will help clinicians and educators best address the needs of children from varying demographics. Finally, by using a Citizen Science paradigm, this project establishes a conduit for science outreach and education. This project will recruit thousands of “volunteer researchers” to record data about their own family environment, parent-child conversations, and child language development using a web-based application accessible through a laptop or mobile phone. In addition to collecting survey responses, this app enables parents to make short audio recordings of their child’s speech and build a scrapbook of developing language abilities over time. When paired with comprehensive recruitment, this platform will assemble speech samples that are both broad and deep and will support more accurate models of relations between children’s learning and long- vs. short-term adversity. Additionally, the varied timing of social disruptions across locations permits both between-family and within-family comparisons of COVID-19 impacts, and yields estimates of effect sizes and modulation by race and socioeconomic status. The data will address questions of urgent societal interest, including a) how COVID-19 policies impact language-learning environments; b) how family stress changes children’s language and communication behavior; and c) what impacts the COVID-19 crisis has on developmental outcomes. Moreover, since social disruptions affect a wide demographic and are largely outside family control, this project leverages the COVID-19 crisis as an unusually clean manipulation of social and economic adversity. This avoids confounds that are persistently problematic in existing research, and will deepen theoretical insight into the factors that affect children’s language learning.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.