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Collecting Big Data with Small Screens: Group-Tests of Children’s Cognition with Touchscreen Tablets are Reliable and Valid
Authors:
BIGNARDI, G., DALMAIJER, E.S., ANWYL-IRVINE, A., and ASTLE, D.E.
Reference:
Behaviour Research Methods, 2 Dec 2020
Year of publication:
2020
CBU number:
8570
Abstract:
Collecting experimental cognitive data with young children usually requires undertaking one-on
one assessments which can be expensive and time-consuming. In addition, there is increasing
acknowledgement of the importance of collecting larger samples for improving statistical power
(Button et al., 2013), and reproducing exploratory findings (Open Science Collaboration, 2015).
One way both these goals can be achieved more easily, even with a small team of researchers, is
to utilize group testing. In this paper, we evaluate the results from a novel tablet application
developed for the Resilience in Education and Development (RED) Study. The RED-app
includes 12 cognitive tasks designed for groups of children aged 7-13 to independently complete
during a one-hour school lesson. The quality of the data collected was high despite the lack of
one-on-one engagement with participants. Most outcomes from the tablet showed moderate or
high reliability, estimated using internal consistency metrics. Tablet-measured cognitive abilities
also explained more than 50% of variance in teacher-rated academic achievement. Overall, the
results suggest that tablet-based, group cognitive assessments of children are an efficient, reliable
and valid method of collecting the large datasets that modern psychology requires. We have
open-sourced the scripts and materials used to make the application, so that they can be adapted
and used by others
URL:
Data for this project is available at:
https://osf.io/xhejz/