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 (‘Individualised Interventions in Learning: Bridging Advanced Learning Science and 21st Century Technology’) 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.
Throughout the project, all five ESRs distinguished themselves in leading projects that advanced our understanding of learning and development at both the individual and group level using new technology, data acquisition techniques, analytic methods, and community outreach approaches. Their success in moving into directly-related research positions - with all ESRs offered employment contracts or postdoctoral fellowship funding before defending their PhDs - speaks to the relevance and quality of their projects. All projects delivered new approaches and tools that were developed and adopted at multiple sites across the INTERLEARN network, and have begun to be used by outside organizations, for instance in understanding how reading in children with dyslexia is affected by different kinds of sound.
INTERLEARN has established new and lasting international scientific partnerships between the beneficiaries (Birkbeck in London and P&G in Frankfurt, whose collaborations have deepened significantly as a function of the project) and each non-academic partner (NeuroDyanamics in Cluj-Napoca, Oefenweb/Prowise in Amsterdam, and Regionaal Instituut voor Dyslexie in Rotterdam/Amsterdam/Maastricht). INTERLEARN Early Stage Researchers have successfully disseminated their work despite the COVID-19 pandemic, including in an online conference organised entirely by them, and attended by stakeholders and members of the public.
