Emotion Understanding
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Understanding one's own or other's emotions is a fundamental skill in children's life. However, little is known about the development of Singaporean children's emotion understanding or its relations to their developmental outcomes.
Thus, this study aims to examine Singaporean children's emotion understanding and its links to anxiety and academic achievement using child-friendly emotion guessing games.
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We are conducting this study face-to-face at NIE. Rest assured that we have safety protocols in place to keep you and your child safe!
Eligibility: Parents with a child between 4-9 years old
Mode: In-person
Remuneration: $10 NTUC voucher and taxi/transport fare
Understanding Choices and Free Will
In collaboration with Early Childhood Cognition Lab from Duke University and Culture and Child Development Lab from East China Normal University, we study how children and adults decide what they can or cannot choose to do when facing different internal and external constraints, such as doing something against their own desire (“Can you choose to not watch TV even though you really want to?”), against the norm (“Can you choose to wear pyjamas to school even though it’s not okay?”), or beyond their capability (“Can you choose to put together a 1000-piece puzzle even though it is really hard?”). We explore how these free will beliefs differ across age, culture, and individual children, and how they relate to children’s mindset and mastery motivation.
We are currently recruiting Singaporean parents and children to participate an online interview which asks children about their free will beliefs, mindset, and mastery motivation.
Eligibility: Parents with a child between 4-10 years of age
Mode: Online
Remuneration: $10
The Development and Diversity of Belief
This study is part of the Developing Belief Network, an international network of social scientists examining the development and diversity of religious cognition and behaviour and studying variation in the acquisition and transmission of religious beliefs and practices. Funded by The John Templeton Foundation, and representing a collaboration between the University of California, Riverside, Boston University, and Databrary, this research network builds on the principles of open and collaborative science and takes an international, cross-cultural, multi-method approach. The aim of this research network is to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition by using cutting-edge mixed-methods to conduct theoretically motivated, cross-cultural comparisons.
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We are currently recruiting Singaporean parents and children to participate in several online sessions of interviews which examines how children come to believe in things they have never seen. It also investigates how children determine what makes people who they are, what people can or cannot do, and how they follow rules and norms.
Eligibility: Parents with a child between 4-11 years old
Mode: Online
Remuneration: $30
Questioning in Teaching and Learning
Asking questions has long been seen as a core component of teaching and learning. But why should questions elicit learning? One line of our research examines the cognitive mechanism behind learning through questioning. Using experimental, observational, interventional and computational methods, we examine how children learn from pedagogical questions--questions asked by a knowledgeable person who intends to teach. Here is the video abstract of a study that explores the different effects of pedagogical questioning and direct instruction on children's exploratory learning.
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We are currently recruiting parent-child dyads to participate in a collaborative study between NIE and KidsSTOP™ from Science Centre Singapore.
Eligibility: Parents with a child between 4-9 years old
Mode: In-person
Remuneration: Free entry to KidsSTOP™ Science Centre and souvenirs
Imitation and Social Learning
Human children are judicious imitators. They imitate to learn new skills, to follow social norms, and to simply have fun. Our research explores how variations in children's imitative behavior reflect these different motivations. We examine 1) how social contexts affect children's imitative response, and 2) how individual differences in imitative behavior relate to children's age, cognitive capacities, temperament, and social experience.
Currently, imitation tasks are part of a large-scale, longitudinal study from CRCD (“BE-POSITIVE”) which follows children from birth to preschool years. We collaborate with local polyclinics to recruit infants and young children to participate in fun games which assesses their academic and non-academicskills.
Eligibility: Parents with a child between 0-3 years old
Mode: In-person (at polyclinics)
Remuneration: $40 per visit and taxi fare
Causal Learning and Computational Modelling
One more line of research examines how learning is affected by the order of how information is presented: For example, will children be more likely to infer teaching when information is presented in a well-timed, clearly focused sequence? Will they learn differently after watching an identical set of actions and events being presented in different orders? We examine these questions in the context of causal learning. Here is an example of stimuli used in one of the studies. After watching the video, do you think the yellow blocks are Blickets?
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In collaboration with members of the CaDas lab, we also explore ways to simulate learning/teaching using computational modelling and data science tools. One example is the model of cooperative inference, which provides a measure of communication effectiveness between a teacher and a learner in a cooperative setting. Another example is a computational framework which attempts to unify teaching and active learning.