Global Collaboration to Capture Variability in Child Development

Ensuring that children around the world can flourish is one of the most important goals of our time. Developmental science has made major strides in understanding how children grow, learn, and thrive – but there’s still much we don’t know.

First, the field has traditionally focused on average effects [1, 2], often overlooking the rich variability that exists both within and between individuals over time and across contexts. Shifting this focus from averages to individual variability offers more precise and nuanced insights into how development unfolds differently for each child. This shift is not only foundational for understanding developmental processes but also critical when assessing and designing educational interventions. To design effective programs, we must move beyond asking whether a program works and instead ask: for whom, under what conditions, and through which mechanisms might it work, or not work, across diverse children and settings.

Second, the vast majority of research is based on WEIRD populations–those from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies [3-5]. Yet 85–90% of children under 12 live outside WEIRD contexts. Despite this imbalance, such studies underpin global policies, interventions, and educational programs, even though their findings may not generalize beyond the settings in which they were produced. Children’s cognitive, socioemotional, and motor development emerge through constant interaction with their environments–shaped by local resources, cultural norms, and everyday opportunities and stressors [6]. Without accounting for this contextual diversity, we risk misunderstanding both children’s needs and their developmental potential.

The Challenge

Tackling these dual challenges – capturing within-person variability and expanding beyond WEIRD populations – requires more than just collecting data more frequently or adding new countries to a study. It demands a fundamental shift in how we conceive, design, implement, and interpret developmental research. This includes forming collaborative, reciprocal partnerships with local communities, learning and being responsive to cultural and contextual realities, and addressing practical challenges such as infrastructure, language, and digital access.

It also means grappling with one of the thorniest issues in cross-cultural research: measurement. We have to ensure that assessment tools are valid across diverse contexts – minimizing bias and ensuring that observed differences reflect genuine developmental variation rather than artefacts of the measurement process.

The key is to adapt in ways that are both thoughtful and respectful of local needs and traditions.
This means working collaboratively with local research teams – who bring their own priorities, expertise, and goals – to adapt our tools in culturally and contextually meaningful ways. This way, we ensure measurements are relevant across settings and are accurately captured through culturally sensitive methods, contributing to a science of child development that is both globally coherent and locally valid.

Our goal

The Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) is working to achieve this. Our goal is to understand how individual variability, group-level differences, and contextual diversity shape children’s learning and development across the globe. LEVANTE takes a uniquely global and multi-layered approach, generating insights within individuals, across populations, and between sociocultural contexts. In doing so, it builds the foundation for more inclusive, context-sensitive research, educational practice, and policy.

Over the past year, we’ve partnered with teams in Colombia, Canada, and Germany to adapt cognitive and developmental measures to local contexts and pilot them with children and families. In 2025, new sites in the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Argentina, Canada, and Switzerland joined our project – further expanding our reach and supporting the testing and refinement of measures across linguistic and cultural contexts.

This blog

We’re launching this blog to share the opportunities, challenges, and lessons we’re learning on our journey to build a global, collaborative platform for developmental science. Our team of about twenty people includes child development researchers, data scientists, software developers, and partnership managers, working together toward this shared goal. We’re learning a lot along the way – from adapting our software infrastructure to support deployment in low-connectivity settings, enabling teachers in rural Colombia to access and use the platform, to examining why certain task items perform differently in Germany compared to Canada.

Over the coming months, we’ll share updates from our software development, analysis and partnerships teams – documenting how we’re tackling key challenges, explaining the trade-offs behind certain decisions, and reflecting on the unexpected obstacles we’ve encountered since launching this project in 2023. There’s still a lot we’re figuring out – and we’re looking forward to sharing our successes and failures with you along the way.

References

1. Blanca, M.J., R. Alarcón, and R. Bono, Frontiers | Current Practices in Data Analysis Procedures in Psychology: What Has Changed? Frontiers in Psychology, 2018. 9.

2. Weissgerber, T.L., et al., Meta-Research: Why we need to report more than ‘Data were Analyzed by t-tests or ANOVA’. eLife, 2018. 7.

3. Henrich, J., S.J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan, The weirdest people in the world? | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2010/06. 33(2-3).

4. Nielsen, M., et al., The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2017/10/01. 162.

5. Kidd, E., R. Garcia, and R.G. Evan Kidd, How diverse is child language acquisition research? First Language, 2022-12. 42(6).

6. Scheidecker, G., et al., Different is not deficient: respecting diversity in early childhood development. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 2022/12/01. 6(12).