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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - INTERLEARN (Individualised Interventions in Learning: Bridging Advanced Learning Science and 21st CenturyTechnology)

Teaser

Summary

Over the last decade, there has been profound scientific progress in understanding how children\'s and ultimately adults\' abilities in various domains are strongly influenced by a host of genetic, environmental, educational, cognitive, and socio-emotional drivers that interact over development. However, we have a much more limited understanding of how, when, and why these factors might affect any given child\'s learning trajectory - and above all, how that individual will respond to an intervention or novel challenge to learning.

Achieving a more complete picture of how an individual child will respond to training is of fundamental importance for a socially and economically diverse European society, one with increasingly stretched resources for raising, educating, and training children, who themselves are confronted with increasing perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, and social demands.

The INTERLEARN (â€˜Individualised Interventions in Learning: Bridging Advanced Learning Science and 21st Century Technologyâ€™) European Industrial Doctorate programme has established an Innovative Training Network via the European Industrial Doctorate scheme, dedicated to creating a new generation of European experts in approaches to interventions in learning. Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) each lead one of a complementary and cohesive set of five multi-methodology projects dedicated to characterising and then manipulating the trajectory of learning at different points in development, starting in very early infancy. Crucially, these targeted interventions in learning are guided by rich multimodal data about genetic, socio-economic, or cognitive characteristics of each individual child, and their momentary attentional, emotional or motivational states. The key objective underlying the research projects in INTERLEARN is to address not only which enhancement of learning is best for an individual child, but also at what point in development and learning this intervention should take place.

The projects in INTERLEARN range from studying how babies\' sleep affects learning, to understanding how social touch and interaction between babies and caregivers can promote learning, to intervening at critical periods in education with online learning platforms that are designed to help children maximise their attentional and cognitive abilities.

Work performed

The work in the project thus far has been dedicated to helping early-stage researchers start their PhDs, train up for their new careers, as well as moving ahead with their own research projects, which are now in their 14th month. The INTERLEARN team has put on a series of intensive workshops across Europe including a scientific \'bootcamp\', a product development course, two neuroimaging workshops, a scientific engagement and dissemination workshop, and has sponsored and participated in several conferences. Early stage researchers have made great progress in their projects, setting up series of experiments in Romania, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK that have already acquired data with the help of hundreds of infant, child, and adult volunteers. Despite being only a year into their program, INTERLEARN early stage researchers have published papers and given a number of conference presentations on their work. They have also engaged with the public with a number of informal presentations, parent sessions, and via social media and the internet. Excitingly, results from at least one INTERLEARN project have already informed the way that online learning is being delivered.

Final results

In the next two years of the project, we expect that these will deliver invaluable information about how children learn, and even more importantly, how we can maximise their chances for learning. One of the most important parts of the INTERLEARN project is that scientific results are translated into changes in educational and societal strategy, and into new industrial and consumer products. Successfully optimising learning techniques to the individual - and making this process practical and understandable for children, parents, and educators - should have major impact on the ability of European society to innovate, invent, and thrive in the next decades.