Descripción del proyecto
Invertir en las habilidades en la primera infancia
Las medidas de desarrollo infantil temprano diseñadas para mejorar la nutrición y crear entornos estimulantes para los niños pequeños pueden mejorar considerablemente la calidad de vida a largo plazo, cuando los niños alcanzan la edad adulta. Los resultados de un estudio sobre las ventajas a largo plazo de las acciones de desarrollo infantil temprano resultan prometedores y han dado lugar a peticiones para que se desarrollen programas a gran escala que integren tales acciones en la infraestructura de servicios públicos existente. A pesar de esta llamada a la acción, recientes observaciones del impacto a corto plazo de las acciones de desarrollo infantil temprano indican que los efectos del programa inicial después se desvanecen. Para estudiar el sorprendente patrón de persistencia y desvanecimiento que suele caracterizar este tipo de estimulación temprana, el proyecto SKILL tiene por objetivo aportar nuevas pruebas sobre los efectos a medio plazo. Además, el proyecto utilizará los progresos en el ámbito del aprendizaje automático para desarrollar un nuevo método de medición de las habilidades infantiles e identificar en cuáles deberían invertir los servicios públicos.
Objetivo
A growing body of cross-disciplinary research highlights the importance of a child’s environment in the first years of life for skill development and outcomes over the life course. This period is thought to be important for human capital accumulation both because very young children are sensitive to their environment and because deprivation during this period can have long-term consequences. Long-term follow-up studies of early childhood development (ECD) interventions to improve nutrition and create stimulating environments have found large and wide-ranging effects into adulthood: increased college attendance, employment, and earnings and reductions in teen pregnancy and criminal activity. These promising long-term effects of ECD interventions have led to calls from policy-makers and academics to develop large-scale programs that integrate ECD interventions into existing public service infrastructure. Despite this recent call to action, evidence of medium-term impacts of more recent integrated ECD intervention shows that there is substantial fade-out of short-term treatment effects. The puzzling persistence and fade-out patterns of ECD interventions requires more evidence on follow-up studies of existing ECD interventions. Of equal importance is a more detailed analysis of which early skills interventions should target to achieve medium-and long-term improvements in human capital. The proposed research agenda aims to address those concerns in two ways. First, by providing new evidence of medium-term effects on a wide range of child development outcomes of a clustered randomized controlled ECD intervention. Secondly, by developing a new methodology to measure infant skills using innovative tools from the field of machine learning. Both research projects would bring more clarity to the academic literature and policy-makers on which type of infant skills are worth investing in.
Ámbito científico
- social sciencessociologygovernancepublic services
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineobstetrics
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesnutrition
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learning
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinador
E1 4NS London
Reino Unido