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

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.