The everyday learning opportunities of young children with attention and motor difficulties: From understanding constraints to reshaping intervention

当孩子们还小的时候，当他们四处走动，看着家里的物体和人时，他们会学到很多东西。家庭和与儿童一起工作的专业人士经常担心，许多幼儿在集中注意力和移动身体方面的困难会影响他们的学习方式。这些困难在发育不同的幼儿（包括患有唐氏综合症，多动症和自闭症的儿童）中普遍存在。事实上，这些困难往往是这些差异的第一面旗帜。这个奖学金将帮助我们找到更好的方法来了解有注意力和运动障碍的幼儿的需求，并支持他们的学习。目前，我们对注意力和运动障碍如何影响日常学习知之甚少。我们所知甚少的原因是，科学家们主要通过让孩子坐在屏幕前来捕捉他们的眼球运动（基于屏幕的眼动仪）或给他们一些新的任务来研究幼儿，这样不同的孩子就可以仔细比较。这种研究儿童发展的方法教会了我们很多关于孩子能做什么的知识，但很少了解他们在日常生活中实际上在做什么。幸运的是，有一些令人兴奋的技术发展，使我们能够站在孩子的立场上，看到他们所看到的，听到他们所听到的。通过在孩子们的头上放置小型轻型摄像机，我们第一次有机会了解注意力和运动困难的幼儿正在经历什么。这可以教我们很多关于他们在家里的日常学习。而这正是我们在这个团契中所要做的。首先，我们将使用特殊的相机与唐氏综合症的幼儿。这是一群我们知道可能会有不同发展的孩子。这些孩子中的许多人从出生就表现出注意力和运动障碍。我们将跟踪这些孩子在生命的头两年，当注意力和运动能力迅速发展。然后，我们将分析在这些能力方面有困难的儿童看到和听到了什么，以及它与没有这些困难的儿童有何不同。这将有助于我们思考如何改善注意力和运动障碍儿童的学习机会。其次，我们将解决在不同环境（包括干预措施）下对大量儿童使用特殊摄像机的主要障碍，即需要大量时间和培训才能从视频片段中提取我们需要的信息。我们将通过使用另一项最新的技术进步来克服这一障碍：机器学习。我们现在可以训练计算机来帮助人类完成一些耗时的工作。我们可以使用我们在奖学金第一部分中分析的视频进行培训。我们的目标是创建帮助每个人的工具（例如，其他研究人员，言语和语言治疗师，物理治疗师），以了解儿童的日常经验。为了确保这些工具是以一种其他人可以轻松使用它们的方式制作的，我们将让这些人中的一些人与我们一起设计工具。第三，我们将与提供干预措施的家庭和专业人员合作，以更好地了解如何提供干预措施，以及使用我们所获得的知识和我们开发的新工具来发挥作用的最佳和最现实的方式。作为这一过程的一部分，我们将花时间与一个慈善机构（唐氏综合症教育国际[DSEI]）合作，该机构在利用研究人员所学到的知识改善儿童生活方面拥有丰富的经验。我们将花四年时间完成奖学金的前三个部分（第一阶段，1-4年）。但它将使我们处于一个强有力的地位，实际上改善幼儿正在接受的干预措施（第二阶段，5-7年级），这将改善他们的发展和生活质量。

When children are young, a lot of learning happens as they move around and look at objects and people at home. Families and professionals working with children often worry that the difficulties many young children have with focusing their attention and moving their bodies affect how they learn. These difficulties are surprisingly widespread in young children who develop differently (including children with Down syndrome, ADHD, and autism). In fact, these difficulties are often the first flags for these differences. This Fellowship will help us to find better ways of understanding the needs of young children with attentional and motor difficulties and supporting their learning.At the moment, little is known about how attentional and motor difficulties affect everyday learning. The reason we know so little is because scientists mostly study young children by sitting them in front of a screen to capture their eye-movements (screen-based eye-tracker) or giving them some new tasks to do, so different children can be carefully compared. This way of studying child development has taught us a lot about what children CAN DO, but very little about what they are ACTUALLY DOING in their everyday lives. Fortunately, there have been some exciting technological developments that allow us to step into the shoes of children and see what they see, and hear what they hear. By putting small light-weight cameras on children's heads, we have an opportunity for the very first time to understand what young children with attentional and motor difficulties are experiencing. This can teach us a lot about their everyday learning at home. And this is exactly what we aim to do in this Fellowship. Firstly, we will use the special cameras with young children with Down syndrome. This is a group of children who we know are likely to be developing differently. A lot of these children show attentional and motor difficulties from birth. We will follow these children across the first two years of life when attentional and motor abilities develop quickly. We will then analyse what children with difficulties in these abilities see and hear and how it differs from children without these difficulties. This will help us to think about how we can improve opportunities for learning in children with attentional and motor difficulties.Secondly, we will tackle the main barrier to using special cameras with a lot of children across different settings (including interventions), which is that it takes a huge amount of time and training to extract the information we need from video footage. We will overcome this barrier by using another recent technological advancement: machine learning. We can now train computers to help with some of the time-consuming work carried out by humans. We can use the videos we analysed during the first part of the Fellowship for this training. Our goal is to create tools that help everyone (e.g., other researchers, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists) to learn about the everyday experiences of children. To make sure the tools are made in a way that other people can easily use them, we will involve some of these people in designing the tools with us. Thirdly, we will work with families and professionals delivering interventions to better understand how the interventions are delivered and what the best and most realistic way would be to use the knowledge we have gained and the new tools we have developed to make a difference. As part of this process, we will spend time working with a charity (Down Syndrome Education International [DSEI]) which has a lot of experience with using what researchers learn to improve children's lives.It will take us four years to complete the first three parts of the Fellowship (Phase 1, Year 1-4). But it will leave us in a strong position to actually improve the interventions young children are receiving (Phase 2, Year 5-7), which will improve their development and quality of life.