Areas of Excellence

Optimizing Early Childhood Development of Children from Low-Resource Settings by Leveraging Technology and Biological Data

Children growing up in low-resource settings (rural areas and lower income urban households) are at an elevated likelihood of developmental delay across domains of language, cognition and socio-emotion, with measurable structural and functional differences in the brain. As early-life developmental challenges persist well beyond childhood, these children are not ready for higher-learning to adapt to the modern economy that relies heavily on technology and services over manual manufacturing. Economists argue that enhancing early childhood development (ECD) is to create the human capital necessary for households to escape from the middle-income trap. However, the best ECD solutions available to date are teacher-intensive and very costly to implement at scale.

The mission of our AoE project is therefore to develop and implement cost-effective ECD intervention strategies. This project qualifies as an AoE because of our distinguished research and service records, interdisciplinary expertise rooted in the humanities and developmental science, community-based research experience that encompasses numerous non-profit organisations in Hong Kong and the Mainland, and most importantly the enormous economic impact that the success of this project would bring to the nation.

In this early-phase exploratory project, we will partner with social organisations across the Mainland (including Hong Kong?) to enroll children from low-resource settings. We will a) develop and evaluate ECD intervention solutions of different costs, b) collect and employ biological data to assist with the eventual identification of children who require the most costly intervention solution, which will enable prescription of such a solution only to children who actually need it, and c) evaluate hypotheses about neuroplastic mechanisms of intervention effectiveness, a basic science goal that can be addressed comprehensively by the large dataset created in this project.

This transdisciplinary endeavor can only be accomplished with expertise as diverse as linguistics, education, neuroscience, bioinformatics, and pediatrics. Our team of young and seasoned researchers is recognised globally as leaders of research in language and human development that bridges the humanities and sciences. To realise the goals of this project, we will apply our extensive experience working with community partners throughout the Mainland as well as the many lessons learned in conducting large-scale projects funded by the Research Grant Council and other agencies that address the multi-faceted nature of human development and early intervention. This AoE represents a disruptive force in ECD and signifies Hong Kong’s unique position in the Mainland’s development.