Frameworks: Cyberinfrastructure for Remote Data Collection with Children

Lookit/儿童帮助科学是一个网站，家庭可以在这里与他们的婴儿和孩子一起参与研究。在过去，研究儿童如何发展和学习的研究人员几乎总是邀请家长把孩子带到研究实验室，或者与学校合作，在上学期间进行研究。因为参与研究可能会给家庭和学校带来很大的负担，许多研究的样本量相对较小，而且往往招募的参与者不能代表所有孩子的不同经历和背景。COVID-19大流行也使人们无法在几个月或几年的时间里进行这类研究，从而关闭了许多旨在改善儿童生活的科学研究。Lookit/Children help Science让研究婴儿和儿童的发育变得更加容易：家庭不需要去任何地方旅行，他们可以在适合自己的时间了解并决定参与一项研究（与研究人员进行视频通话，或自行安排活动）。现在，该网站正在进行扩展，以便将用于研究儿童思维如何发展的远程研究（心理学研究）的相同工具和程序应用于有关儿童在学校的学习和经历的问题（教育研究）。为了做到这一点，调查人员与教师、学校管理人员、家庭和教育研究人员合作，了解网站在这些新环境下还需要什么。例如，现在，通常父母或监护人在他们的孩子参加研究时与他们在一起，所以他们可以了解并决定他们的孩子是否应该同时参加。如果一个老师是建立这项研究的人，那么这个网站将需要新的方法来让家长和老师都能跟踪孩子的信息。对婴儿和儿童的研究比对成人的类似研究要困难得多，但将这项研究转移到网上可以帮助研究更好（犯更少的错误），对所提出的问题更灵活，更适用于各种背景的儿童如何学习和成长。研究人员经常为心理学或医学等特定领域制作工具，但对儿童的研究涉及许多不同的主题。通过围绕家庭和儿童的需求组织研究人员的工具，而不是围绕特定科学主题的需求，这个网站将让各行各业的人从许多不同的角度参与研究，所有这些都旨在改善我们对婴儿和儿童如何学习和成长的了解。拟议的网络基础设施是儿童在线心理和教育研究的集中平台，直接支持教育和人力资源部（EHR）和社会，行为和经济科学局（SBE）的目标。许多针对儿童的研究可以转化为在线任务，要么是完全由电脑“无节制”管理，要么是通过与研究人员的视频聊天“节制”。在COVID大流行期间，这种方法的受欢迎程度激增，几乎涵盖了涉及人类参与者数据收集的所有类型的研究。目前的奖项建立在发展心理学的Lookit/儿童帮助科学平台的成功基础上，同时扩展到一个新的领域，即教育研究，这两个领域都有共同的限制，并且可以从在线参与者池等共享资源中受益。具体而言，目标是：(1)支持额外的研究类型，包括在学校进行的教育研究和现场互动研究。(2)通过促进多语言研究和提供移动设备支持，为更广泛的研究人员和参与者提供便利。(3)提高平台研究的质量和可重复性。(4)促进使用该平台的研究人员的持续贡献。除了提高研究速度之外，该基础设施还旨在推动教育研究的进步，使其更加稳健，推广范围更广：例如，与其在一个地区的一所学校测试干预措施，还不如在全国范围内同时测试干预措施，并在每个地点以完美的一致性实施。这将增加可复制性、普遍性，以及在广泛的发展研究中调查个体差异的能力。儿童研究对许多社会目标至关重要，包括为教学实践和教育政策提供信息。无论地理位置如何，这种网络基础设施都提供了这些急需的工具，为资源不足的研究人员和代表性不足的群体增加了机会，并扩大了在不同人群中进行科学推广和研究参与的机会。除了对该平台在这一投资阶段后将服务的研究领域产生影响外，这项工作还将为其他领域的数字基础设施提供关键的见解、机会和工具。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。

Lookit/Children Helping Science is a website where families can participate in research with their infants and children from home. In the past, researchers who study how children develop and learn have almost always either invited families to bring their children to a research lab, or else have worked with schools to conduct studies that take place during the school day. Because participating in studies can place a big burden on families and schools, many of these studies have worked with relatively small sample sizes, and often recruit a group of participants who do not represent the diverse experiences and backgrounds of all children. The COVID-19 pandemic has also made it impossible to conduct these kinds of studies for months or years at a time, shutting down much of the scientific that is designed to improve children’s lives. Lookit/Children Helping Science has made it much easier to conduct studies about how infants and children develop: families don’t need to travel anywhere, and they can learn about and decide to participate in a research study (either a video call with a researcher, or a self-paced activity) at a time that works for them. Now, the website is being expanded so that the same tools and procedures for doing remote research about how children’s minds develop (psychological research) can be applied to questions about children’s learning and experience in schools (educational research). To do this, the investigators work with teachers, school administrators, families, and education researchers to learn what else is needed for the website to work in these new contexts. For instance, right now, usually parents or guardians are with their children while they take the study, so they can learn about and decide if their child should participate at the same time. If a teacher is the one to set up the study, then the website will need new ways to let both families and teachers keep track of a child’s information. Studies with infants and children are much harder to carry out than similar studies with adults, but moving this research online can help studies to be better (making fewer mistakes), more flexible for the questions being asked, and more applicable to how children from all backgrounds learn and grow. Researcher often make tools for a specific field like psychology or medicine, but research with children happens across many different topics. By organizing the tools for researchers around the needs of families and children, rather than around the needs of a particular scientific topic, this website will let people from all walks of life participate in studies from many different perspectives, all aiming to improve what we know about how infants and children learn and grow.The proposed cyberinfrastructure is a centralized platform for online psychological and educational research with children, directly supporting goals of the Directorates for Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Many studies with children can be translated into online tasks, either “unmoderated” and administered entirely by computer, or “moderated” via video chat with a researcher. The popularity of such approaches has exploded during the COVID pandemic, across nearly every type of research that involves data collection with human participants.The present award builds on the success of the Lookit/Children Helping Science platform with developmental psychology and simultaneously extend to a new domain, education research, that both has common constraints and can benefit from shared resources like online participant pools. In particular, the objectives are: (1) Support additional research types, including educational research conducted in schools and live interactive studies. (2) Accommodate a wider range of researchers and participants by facilitating multilingual studies and providing mobile device support. (3) Improve the quality and reproducibility of research conducted on the platform. (4) Facilitate sustained contributions by researchers who use the platform. Beyond increasing the speed of research, this infrastructure aims to unlock advances in educational research that are more robust and generalize more widely: for example, rather than an intervention being tested in one school in one location, with corresponding limitations regarding generalizing conclusions, the intervention might simultaneously be tested across the country, implemented with perfect consistency at each location. This will increase replicability, generalizability, and the ability to investigate individual differences across a broad range of developmental research. Research with children is essential for many societal aims, including informing pedagogical practices and educational policy. This cyberinfrastructure provides these much-needed tools regardless of geographical location, increasing opportunities for under-resourced researchers and underrepresented groups and expanding opportunities for scientific outreach and study participation among diverse populations. In addition to the impact on the areas of research that the platform will serve after this phase of investment, this work will also provide key insights, opportunities, and tools for digital infrastructure in other domains.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.