ABC Lab

The ABC Lab accelerates children’s learning through an innovative platform to evaluate online teaching games and tools. 

Early literacy and numeracy have lifelong educational, economic, and public health benefits. Scalable, affordable early literacy and numeracy learning tools can make meaningful and easily adopted improvements to children’s learning — but only if they work. The ABC (A/B/no-treatment-Control) Lab will develop experiments to assess the efficacy of popular commercially available apps in the most impactful areas of early childhood education. The lab will communicate the results to the general public through accessible, trustworthy, high-visibility messaging. 

The team developing this platform has already had great success with Children Helping Science. These new efforts will provide valuable resources for parents and educators. 

An Innovative Approach 

The ABC Lab will study the efficacy of educational apps, with results available immediately and transparently to the public. Through rapid-cycle, low-cost randomized control trials with an initial focus on literacy and numeracy of three to five-year-olds, the approach can impact kindergarten readiness at scale. 

Playing while Learning 

Parents who choose to enroll their children will provide background information and be compensated for their time. Children’s initial skills will be assessed through automated, online testing. Children will engage in “real-world” play with their assigned app over the course of six weeks. The children’s post-play performance will be assessed to see how well each app teaches what it claims to teach. 

Building on Success 

The ABC Lab is led by the team that created Children Helping Science, the preeminent platform for automated, asynchronous, and video-based studies for developmental science, currently used by over 1,300 scientists from 150 institutions in 14 countries. Prof. Laura Schulz’ research focuses on the processes that support exploration, inquiry, and discovery in early childhood. She has contributed to topics including early STEM learning, causal reasoning, social cognition, and the connection between play and learning. Also leading the ABC Lab is Dr. Melissa Kline Struhl, the Executive Director of Children Helping Science. The researchers’ relationships with experts in early math, literacy, learning, and mobile media use will help guide the ABC Lab. Over 15,000 families have joined Children Helping Science, a great resource for the ABC Lab.

Support Children Helping Science and the ABC Lab through the MIT Giving Site.