RAPID: Collaborative Research: A "Citizen Science" approach to COVID-19 social distancing effects on children's language development

RAPID：合作研究：采用“公民科学”方法研究 COVID-19 社交距离对儿童语言发展的影响

基本信息

批准号：
2030106
负责人：
Joshua Hartshorne
金额：
$ 15.19万
依托单位：
Boston College
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2020
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2020-06-01 至 2022-05-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2030106&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
RAPID Collaborative Research Citizen Science

项目摘要

The COVID-19 pandemic is a significant threat to learning and language development for large numbers of children. Such challenges are compounded for those facing social and economic adversity, factors that are associated with decreased parental interactions, child development, and school achievement. This study examines the scope and magnitude of learning impacts from COVID19 pandemic by engaging families as “Citizen Scientists” who will track their children’s language use during the crisis. Social-distancing policies vary by state, enabling the researchers to compare how these different decisions affect children’s language development. This will help policymakers and educators make more informed decisions, both about crisis management and strategies to mitigate negative effects of crisis-related policies. More broadly, this work will make important contributions to the science of language learning, which in turn will help clinicians and educators best address the needs of children from varying demographics. Finally, by using a Citizen Science paradigm, this project establishes a conduit for science outreach and education. This project will recruit thousands of “volunteer researchers” to record data about their own family environment, parent-child conversations, and child language development using a web-based application accessible through a laptop or mobile phone. In addition to collecting survey responses, this app enables parents to make short audio recordings of their child’s speech and build a scrapbook of developing language abilities over time. When paired with comprehensive recruitment, this platform will assemble speech samples that are both broad and deep and will support more accurate models of relations between children’s learning and long- vs. short-term adversity. Additionally, the varied timing of social disruptions across locations permits both between-family and within-family comparisons of COVID-19 impacts, and yields estimates of effect sizes and modulation by race and socioeconomic status. The data will address questions of urgent societal interest, including a) how COVID-19 policies impact language-learning environments; b) how family stress changes children’s language and communication behavior; and c) what impacts the COVID-19 crisis has on developmental outcomes. Moreover, since social disruptions affect a wide demographic and are largely outside family control, this project leverages the COVID-19 crisis as an unusually clean manipulation of social and economic adversity. This avoids confounds that are persistently problematic in existing research, and will deepen theoretical insight into the factors that affect children’s language learning.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.

COVID-19大流行是对大量儿童的学习和语言发展的重大威胁。对于那些面临社会和经济逆境的人，与父母互动的改善，儿童发展和学校成就相关的因素，这种挑战变得更加复杂。这项研究研究了通过与家庭成为“公民科学家”的家庭，他们将在危机期间跟踪孩子的语言使用，从而研究了Covid19大流行的范围和幅度。社会矛盾的政策因国家而异，使研究人员能够比较这些不同的决定如何影响儿童的语言发展。这将有助于政策制定者和教育工作者做出更明智的决定，包括危机管理和减轻与危机相关政策的负面影响的战略。更广泛地说，这项工作将为语言学习科学做出重要贡献，这反过来又将帮助临床医生和教育工作者的最佳儿童地址。最后，通过使用公民科学范式，该项目建立了科学外展和教育的渠道。该项目将招募成千上万的“志愿研究人员”记录有关他们自己的家庭环境，亲子对话和儿童语言开发的数据，该数据使用可通过笔记本电脑或手机访问的基于Web的应用程序来记录。除了收集调查答复外，该应用程序还可以使父母对孩子的言语进行简短的录音，并随着时间的推移制作一份关于发展语言能力的剪贴簿。当与全面的招聘配对时，该平台将组装既广泛又深刻的语音样本，并将支持儿童学习与长期广告之间更准确的关系模型。此外，各个位置的社会中断时间的各种时机允许在家庭内部和家庭内部对19的影响之间的比较，并逐渐估计种族和社会经济地位的效果大小和调制。数据将解决紧急社会兴趣的问题，包括a）共同-19政策如何影响语言学习环境； b）家庭压力如何改变儿童的语言和沟通行为； c）影响199危机对发展结果的影响。此外，由于社会中断会影响广泛的人口，并且在很大程度上是家庭控制之外的，因此该项目将Covid-19危机作为对社会和经济逆境的一种异常清洁的操纵。这避免了在现有研究中持续存在问题的混杂，并将加深理论上对影响儿童语言学习的因素的理论见解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是通过基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响来审查标准的评估，被认为是宝贵的支持。