Frameworks: Cyberinfrastructure for Remote Data Collection with Children

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

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.