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

学龄前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之间是如何变化的，让大量不同的儿童样本长期参与多项研究是很重要的。不幸的是，由于目前面对面方法的挑战，以前对儿童的研究大多是小样本，多样性有限，并且随着年龄的增长，同一儿童参与多项研究的机会有限。本项目将通过在许多研究中收集大量不同样本的数据来解决这些局限性。为了实现这一目标，这将是多所大学之间的合作，家庭可以在家里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型网站，他们的孩子可以在家里参与在线研究，并使他们能够更多地了解发展科学。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。收集到的数据将涉及3至6岁儿童思维和推理相关认知发展的几个经典测量的大规模复制和扩展，并将把新的实验研究整合到基础设施中，以了解过去的发现是如何概括的，以及一项任务的行为是如何与其他任务相关的。在项目的后续阶段，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他们自己的研究，并将能够使用初始数据来指导新的研究问题。研究结果将有助于改进认知发展和教育的理论模型，并为具有创新性、代表性和开放性的研究提供学科范围的机会。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 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.