[CogSci] Join the Children Helping Science Relaunch -- Your new, improved hub for online developmental research

[Laura Schulz]

Dear Colleagues,


It's hard to believe, but we are coming up on the three year anniversary of
Children Helping Science - a website we launched at the start of the
pandemic to enable researchers around the world to post developmental
studies online and provide a common population base for recruiting
participants for developmental research.

In the meantime, we have been working to build infrastructure that can
support remote studies in the long term - not as a pandemic stopgap, but as
a fundamental addition to the methodological toolkit of the developmental
sciences.

We are writing now with an important update -- and an important request
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gK1GboG6qeaKcskCH38_XnG_kjIR0uLd/view?usp=share_link>
.

On May 25th, we are going to shut down the old Children Helping Science
site and complete a merger and migration we began last Fall to bring a new,
improved version of Children Helping Science to the Lookit platform
<https://lookit.mit.edu/>. An updated version of the current Lookit site
will be available at ChildrenHelpingScience.com, replacing the old Children
Helping Science site.

All the functionality previously available on the old Children Helping
Science site has been preserved, and you can continue to direct
participants to a landing page for each of your own studies.

Many additional functions are now possible. In particular:

   -

   ~10,000 families are already on the platform. You can recruit from them
   immediately.
   -

   When you bring your existing online study to the platform, it will be
   approved and posted within three business days. Once a study is posted,
   you can pause, re-start and take down your own studies without waiting for
   a moderator.
   -

   You can launch both moderated video studies (scheduled, researcher
   present) and automated, asynchronous studies (no experimenter present)
   -

   You can target recruitment toward your population of interest, with
   automatic filters for exact age, languages spoken, and other criteria (e.g.
   “Multiple-birth children either under 1 year or over 3 years of age”)
   -

   There is a thriving Slack community of researchers who peer review each
   other’s work and share strategies for successful online studies. There is
   no comparable online space for collaboratively developing attractive,
   rigorous, remote studies for children.

We have also added a number of features that make the new Children Helping
Science platform more user-friendly and encourage families to keep engaging
with the site:

   -

   Families will only need to sign up once for an account and their
   information (including the demographic information families provide) will
   be shared with researchers when they access a new study.
   -

   Families will be able to see what studies are available for their
   specific children and track which studies they have completed.
   -

   Families will automatically receive emails notifying them when studies
   for their children become available -- helping you with recruitment.

Here's what we are asking of all of you in the field: If you are currently
running any online studies, please also add them to the new Children
Helping Science site.

If you belong to any of the ~100 institutions already on the site
<https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n3LKOIEStI4kYn0G4dXjaFmQ9B99RIg-8LvSMQRd6gw/edit?usp=sharing>
you will be able to have any existing study ready to post in 15 minutes or
less. If your institution isn't already listed, we can help you out.

Here
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gK1GboG6qeaKcskCH38_XnG_kjIR0uLd/view?usp=share_link>
is everything you need to know to have your study ready to post.

Why join the relaunched Children Helping Science platform?

As noted, there are currently ~10,000 families enrolled on the new
platform. All of these families are interested in developmental research
and the children range from infants to adolescents. We can imagine a future
where we could expand that to 100,000 families.

But to do that, we need content -- from everyone in the field. Families are
interested in the research we do, but they need to know there will always
be new studies available for their children. That takes all of us.

Having a stable flow of studies will prepare for our next stage:
advertising the site as a whole, and attracting additional external funding
to support the platform.

Any energy you invest in recruiting participants for your own study through
the platform will benefit your study first and foremost, but they will also
benefit the field as a whole -- and your studies will benefit from the
recruitment efforts of others.

Critically -- you can continue to advertise and post your studies on any
other platform or site you like. Please just *also* consider posting to
Children Helping Science. It will not limit any additional outreach you do,
and it will give you ready access to thousands of interested participants.

This relaunch of Children Helping Science, merged with the Lookit platform,
will allow us, as scientists, to build a broad, diverse, participant pool
-- and also allow us to greatly expand families' access to science. The
platform is open source, and, like the old one, free to all users.

To help researchers working through how to share their studies, Melissa
Kline Struhl (Lookit Executive Director) will hold open meeting hours over
Zoom on May 18th from 8am-11am EDT <https://mit.zoom.us/j/99613755934> and May
22nd from 2pm-5pm EDT <https://mit.zoom.us/j/95941448269>. Please feel free
to swing by if you have questions, or email her at mekline at mit.edu to set
up a time to meet.

Finally, we are thinking about other ways to make Children Helping Science
a wonderful resource for researchers and for families. We will share more
information in the upcoming months for other ways that researchers can get
involved.

Please join us, and thank you for all your support and engagement since the
pandemic!

All the best,

The Parent and Researcher Collaborative

Elizabeth Bonawitz, Hyowon Gweon, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Candice Mills,
Marjorie Rhodes, Mark Sheskin, and Laura Schulz and Melissa Kline Struhl
(Lookit PI and Lookit Executive Director)

-- 
Laura Schulz

Professor of Cognitive Science
Associate Dep't Head for DEIJ
Dep't of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
617-253-7957
lschulz at mit.edu
https://mit.zoom.us/my/lauraschulzmeeting
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cognitivesciencesociety.org/pipermail/announcements-cognitivesciencesociety.org/attachments/20230501/8fe7fa56/attachment-0001.htm>