Project overview
Children Helping Science (CHS) is a platform for doing developmental research run by a small academic group at MIT. Our vision is of a collaborative online lab:
Large collaborative “online lab” run by group at MIT
Single participant interface; shared participant pool, servers; central & shared recruitment in addition to individual labs’ efforts
CHS team provides training, IRB coordination, study implementation, design support, ongoing development, documentation
Researchers independent, but with centralized approval of studies (covering technical problems, basic compliance with ethical guidelines, and clarity for parents)
Support/incentives for best practices (e.g. preregistration, publishing materials and data, clearly demarcating pilot data)
Can be funded (at steady state) primarily by participating labs’ usage, although open to alternate models
Mission statement
Lower barriers to conducting and participating in rigorous, reproducible developmental research that advances the understanding of development and its implications for education, parenting, policy, and medicine.
We are committed to
Open source development
Encouraging data and protocol sharing
Encouraging best practices in experimental design
Advancing our understanding of methods
Recruiting a representative participant pool
Respecting participants’ time and parents as partners in discovery
Enabling non-traditional developmental researchers and supporting work that benefits children or families