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

注意力和运动困难幼儿的日常学习机会：从理解限制到重塑干预

• 批准号: MR/X032922/1
• 负责人: Hana D'Souza
• 金额: $ 201.9万
• 依托单位: CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FX032922%2F1
• 关键词: everyday; learning; opportunities; young; children

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.

当孩子们年轻时，当他们四处走动并看着物体和家里的人时，就会发生很多学习。与孩子一起工作的家庭和专业人士通常会担心许多年幼的孩子在集中注意力和移动身体的困难会影响他们的学习方式。这些困难令人惊讶地在不同的幼儿中普遍存在（包括患有唐氏综合症，多动症和自闭症的儿童）。实际上，这些困难通常是这些差异的第一个旗帜。这项奖学金将帮助我们找到更好的方法来理解注意力和运动困难并支持学习的幼儿的需求。在这一刻，人们对注意力和运动困难如何影响日常学习知之甚少。我们之所以如此少的原因是，科学家主要是通过坐在屏幕前来学习幼儿以捕捉他们的眼动（基于屏幕的眼球轨迹）或给他们一些新的任务要做，因此可以仔细比较不同的孩子。这种研究儿童发展的方式教会了我们很多关于儿童可以做的事情，但对他们在日常生活中实际做的事情很少。幸运的是，已经有一些令人兴奋的技术发展，使我们能够进入孩子们的鞋子，看看他们看到的东西，并听到他们听到的声音。通过将小轻质摄像机放在儿童头上，我们有机会第一次了解患有注意力和运动困难的幼儿正在遇到什么。这可以教会我们很多关于他们在家日常学习的知识。这正是我们在这项奖学金中要做的。首先，我们将与唐氏综合症的幼儿一起使用特殊的摄像机。这是一群我们知道的孩子，可能会有所不同。这些孩子中有很多从出生开始就表现出注意力和运动困难。我们将跟随这些孩子在生命的头两年中，注意力和运动能力迅速发展。然后，我们将分析这些能力困难的儿童看到和听到的情况以及在没有这些困难的情况下与儿童有何不同。这将有助于我们思考如何改善注意力和运动困难的儿童学习机会。第二，我们将解决在不同环境（包括干预措施）中使用很多儿童使用特殊摄像机的主要障碍，这是需要大量的时间和培训来从视频录像中提取我们需要的信息。我们将通过使用另一个最近的技术进步来克服这一障碍：机器学习。现在，我们可以训练计算机来帮助人类进行的一些耗时的工作。我们可以使用奖学金第一部分中分析的视频进行此培训。我们的目标是创建工具，以帮助每个人（例如其他研究人员，言语和语言治疗师，物理治疗师）了解儿童的日常经历。为了确保以其他人轻松使用它们的方式制造工具，我们将与其中一些人一起与我们一起设计工具。第三，我们将与家庭和专业人士合作，提供干预措施，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以及我们开发的新工具以有所作为的最佳和最现实的方法。作为此过程的一部分，我们将花费时间与慈善机构（Down综合症教育国际[DSEI]）合作，该慈善机构在利用研究人员学会改善儿童生活方面具有丰富的经验。它将花费我们四年的时间才能完成研究金的前三个部分（第1阶段1-4年）。但是，这将使我们处于强大的位置，可以实际改善幼儿所接受的干预措施（第2阶段，第5-7年），这将改善他们的发展和生活质量。