When the COVID-19 pandemic limited ways to conduct in-person developmental psychology studies, researchers pivoted to create an innovative solution that now, with new National Science Foundation (NSF) support, could transform the field into a more collaborative science with more diverse research participants.
Dr. Candice Mills, associate professor of psychology in The University of Texas at Dallas’ School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, has received a three-year, $1.25 million grant from the NSF to develop an online platform for research on cognitive development in children ages 3 to 6. The result will be a website that will offer fun research activities for families and will help scientists understand child development on a larger scale than ever before.
“Developmental scientists have often worked as individuals or in small teams, and there are limitations to this work compared to larger collaborations,” Mills said. “Together, we can do larger studies with more participants, and we can combine data to have a more complete understanding of the children who participate in our research.”
The project — referred to as CRADLE (Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments) — grew out of the Children Helping Science initiative that was born out of pandemic-induced restrictions on conducting face-to-face research. Mills is the principal investigator on the project, overseeing its research component, while Dr. Mark Sheskin, associate professor of social sciences at Minerva University, oversees the infrastructure development as co-principal investigator.
Mills and Sheskin are joined on the research team by Dr. Elizabeth Bonawitz of Harvard University, Dr. Hyowon Gweon of Stanford University, Dr. Julian Jara-Ettinger of Yale University, Dr. Marjorie Rhodes of New York University and Dr. Laura Schulz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“ChildrenHelpingScience.com was a solution for an immediate problem: Researchers had to move their research online,” Mills said. “How do we make this as efficient as possible? How can we help researchers connect to families and families connect to lots of different opportunities to participate in research studies from home? As we discussed the immediate needs, we also thought about ways online research can be beneficial for science.”
Broader Range of Participants
Mills said the new platform — which she envisions as a “one-stop shop website” from the perspective of families involved in studies — should make it easier for children to participate in developmental research, as well as help to recruit larger and more representative groups of participants, which in turn will yield higher-quality research.
“Academic developmental studies can suffer from demographic bias toward whomever is able to come to a college campus to participate,” she said. “One of our goals is to have something that parents can complete with their children from home, or from community centers or libraries, making it possible to reach a broader range of families than we have in the past.”
The site’s infrastructure will be designed to make researchers’ jobs easier in several ways.
“Not only will it be simpler to involve participants who might not normally be within reach, but we’re also developing this infrastructure to allow researchers to securely share data across studies,” Mills said. “If a family completes a series of measures, those measures would be available to other researchers who might recruit them further down the line for a new study. Having that first data point already available opens up a huge range of possibilities in the kind of research questions we can ask.”
“One of our goals is to have something that parents can complete with their children from home, or from community centers or libraries, making it possible to reach a broader range of families than we have in the past.”
Dr. Candice Mills, associate professor of psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences
In particular, such a system would greatly simplify doing longitudinal studies, which gather data on the same subjects across a long period of time. Such data is particularly important in a field like developmental psychology.
“We believe large-scale longitudinal research will be possible in ways that have previously been unimaginable,” Mills said. “We can test children at one stage via several classic studies, then easily follow up a few years down the road. Following one group of kids over time can provide rich understanding that doesn’t necessarily show up when you’re comparing one group of 6-year-olds to one group of 10-year-olds in terms of developmental trajectories.”
Transforming Approach
For the first few years, the project will focus on the age range of 3 to 6, a particularly rich time for cognitive development, Mills said.
“A 3-year-old is usually speaking in short sentences and having some interactions with peers but still learning emotion regulation and how to take other people’s perspectives,” she said. “By age 6, children have typically transitioned to elementary school. They are usually speaking in paragraphs and are much better at seeing others’ perspectives and regulating their emotions, although they still have room to grow. A tremendous amount of change happens between ages 3 and 6.”
The research component of the project is twofold: One part is a large-scale replication and extension of several classic developmental research studies; the second involves putting new research into the framework, with Mills and her collaborators creating new projects and modules.
“Starting with classic measures will allow families and researchers to see how these studies work in an online environment, and they will also help researchers discover and confirm the best ways to do research online,” she said. “This work will provide the foundation for the large-scale research involving fascinating new studies that are only possible within the new online infrastructure.”
At its core, Mills and her colleagues hope CRADLE can nurture a transformation in how developmental science is performed and what it can reveal.
“Developmental science is not currently making full use of the internet revolution of recent decades,” Sheskin said. “Although there is a lot of great science that can be done by individual researchers working face to face with children in their local area, there is huge untapped potential to do additional great work online, especially by creating a central resource for both researchers and families.”
Mills added: “Our long-term vision is of a collaborative field with high transparency and reproducibility, where we lower barriers to more representative science, share findings and provide outreach opportunities.”