Innovating Developmental Science with an Online, Scalable Meta-Science Platform for Investigating Cognitive Development During Early Childhood

通过在线、可扩展的元科学平台创新发展科学，研究幼儿时期的认知发展

• 批准号: 2042489
• 负责人: Candice Mills
• 金额: $ 125万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Dallas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2024-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2042489&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Innovating; Developmental; Science; Online; Scalable

The preschool years are a particularly rich time for development in children’s thinking and learning. To gain a deeper understanding of how children develop and how this development can vary across children, it is important to have a large and diverse sample of children participate in multiple studies over time. Unfortunately, due to challenges with current in-person methods, much of the previous research on children has small samples, with limited diversity, and with limited opportunities for the same children to participate in multiple studies as they age. This project will address these limitations by collecting data with a large and diverse sample in many studies over time. To do so, it will be a collaboration across multiple universities in which families participate conveniently at home, over the internet.This research will present parents with a family-friendly website where their child will be able to participate in research studies online from home and will enable them to learn more about developmental science. Using this approach, researchers will be able to design and conduct online studies as well as share data. The collected data will involve large-scale replication and extension of several classic measures of cognitive development related to thinking and reasoning in children ages 3 to 6, and will integrate new experimental studies into the infrastructure to understand how generalizable past findings are and how behavior on one task relates to others. In subsequent phases of this project, scholars outside of the project’s initial collaborative network will be invited to use the infrastructure for their own research and will be able to use the initial data to guide new research questions. The results will have implications for improving theoretical models of cognitive development and education and launch discipline-wide opportunities for innovative, representative, and open research.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.

学龄前几年是儿童思维和学习发展的特别丰富的时期。为了更深入地了解儿童是如何发展的，以及这种发展在不同儿童中的差异，重要的是让大量不同的儿童样本随着时间的推移参与多项研究。不幸的是，由于当前面对面方法的挑战，以前对儿童的许多研究样本很少，多样性有限，相同的儿童随着年龄的增长参与多项研究的机会也很有限。随着时间的推移，这个项目将通过在许多研究中收集大量和多样化的样本来解决这些限制。要做到这一点，这将是一项跨越多所大学的合作，家庭在家中通过互联网方便地参与其中。这项研究将为父母提供一个家庭友好网站，在那里他们的孩子将能够在家参与在线研究，并使他们能够了解更多关于发展科学的知识。使用这种方法，研究人员将能够设计和进行在线研究，以及共享数据。收集的数据将涉及几项与3至6岁儿童思维和推理相关的认知发展经典指标的大规模复制和推广，并将把新的实验研究整合到基础设施中，以了解过去的研究结果有多普遍，以及一项任务的行为与其他任务的关系如何。在该项目的后续阶段，项目初始合作网络之外的学者将被邀请使用基础设施进行自己的研究，并将能够使用初始数据来指导新的研究问题。这一结果将对改进认知发展和教育的理论模型产生影响，并为创新、有代表性和开放的研究提供跨学科的机会。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。