For Parents
The success of the Child Study Center depends completely on the willingness of parents
to participate in our research. We offer many thanks to those of you who have already
participated in a study with your child or children!
Never participated? Follow the link for information for new parents.
FROM 30 MINUTES TO PUBLICATION
Now that you've spent 30 minutes with your child in one or maybe two or three studies, you may be wondering
how those 30 minutes contribute to greater understanding of child development.
Like all research, our studies begin with questions: when are preschool children able to
understand the relation between a scale model and the larger space it stands for, what do
toddlers absorb through being read picture books, how do early school age children perceive
physical reality? Every child that we observe helps us to figure out the answers to these and other questions.
It's exciting to see not only how our knowledge grows as a study progresses, but also how further
questions emerge.
The ultimate goal of the research we do at the Child Study Center is to contribute to scientific
knowledge about child development. Your child's 30 minutes in the lab will eventually find its way into lectures and posters
presented to progessional societies and ultimately to articles reporting the research in scientific journals.
Another important function of the lab is to educate students about how to do research. Your
child may have participated in a study that was part of a graduate student's dissertation
or an undergraduate student's project. Learning how to conduct good developmental research is
impossible without observing and interacting with real kids doing real (sometimes surprising)
things. Many of these students, both graduate and undergraduate, will go on to contribute to child
development research after completing their education at the University of Virginia and the Child
Study Center.
As you can see, the short time that you and your child spend in our lab contributes greatly to
the overal understanding of child development. Thank you for sharing your family's time with us!
For those of you who have never visited our lab or participated in a research study,
please click here for more information!
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