About

The Jacobs Foundation is pleased to announce the 2024 Call for Proposals for its LEVANTE framework to understand how children grow, learn, and develop across different times, places, and contexts so that they can be supported to thrive in the multitude of experiences they will encounter throughout life.

It brings together researchers from around the world to create the first cross-cultural, multidisciplinary open dataset aiming to capture the richness and diversity of child development and learning.
 

The overarching objective of LEVANTE is to identify how individual variability, group heterogeneity, and contextual variability influence children’s learning and development. By including data collection of common measures on these different areas longitudinally and at a global level, LEVANTE will help researchers, educators, and policymakers understand child development within individuals, within groups, and across contexts, thus improving future learning outcomes for diverse groups of children worldwide. 

The focus of the Jacobs Foundation is fostering scientific excellence and building a strong network of internationally active researchers in the field of child and youth development with a strong focus on variability of learning and to foster long-term collaboration with other researchers and The Foundation itself.

Focus Areas

• Embracing and understanding variability in learning across the three dimensions described in the Jacobs Foundation Research Agenda: within-subject, within-group, and contextual variability.

• Focus on typically developing children within the age range 2-12 (i.e., compulsory primary school years). However, because selecting measures for young children ages 2 – 5 carries a number of special challenges, the first call for proposals for LEVANTE focuses on children ages 5 –12. The available measures address both the general constructs and the specific tasks and measures to be adopted by the LEVANTE framework for children ages 5 – 12. These measures are currently available in English, Spanish and German.

Funding Information

• Small projects – new data

  • Maximum budget: CHF 400.000 over a minimum of 3 years

  • Small projects are expected to support:

  • Collection of LEVANTE measures in new samples

  • Addition of LEVANTE measures to ongoing or planned studies

  • Supplementation of LEVANTE data collection with other measure types 

• Large projects – new data

  • Maximum budget: CHF 700.000 over a minimum of 3 years.

  • Large projects are expected to support:

  • Collection of LEVANTE measures in new samples of greater size or with specific population characteristics of interest that require greater resource expenditure

  • Supplementation of LEVANTE data collection with other measure types (see above)

  • Extensions of the LEVANTE framework (e.g., to new languages) 

• Analysis projects

  • In addition, in years 2 – span, analysis projects are expected to support:

  • Psychometric modeling of the LEVANTE dataset

  • Novel analyses of the LEVANTE dataset 

  • Harmonization of LEVANTE data with other datasets

Selection Criteria

• The following selection criteria are considered in the selection process:

  • Scientific quality of methods and data

  • Publication record and experience on similar collaborative projects.

  • Feasibility of the proposed project.

  • Availability of resources and capacity of the lab.

  • Innovativeness, uniqueness, and value proposition of the proposed project.

  • Geographic localization of the proposed project and demographic representativeness of the sample.

  • Conceptual alignment and integration of planned project with the LEVANTE framework.

  • Collaboration and/or multidisciplinary character of the proposed project.

  • Inclusion of young scholars in the team.

  • Inclusion of additional measures with no/limited additional funding request.

Eligibility

• Main applicants should: 

  • Have obtained a PhD or equivalent degree at least 5 years prior to the application deadline.

  • Be employed by and be part of a research lab at an institution of higher education or research institute.

  • Be conducting high-quality research in the area of variability of learning and development.

  • Be committed to engaging with and contributing to the activities of both LEVANTE and the Jacobs Foundation.

• As a global program, LEVANTE encourages applications from all countries, bearing also in mind the special interest of the Jacobs Foundation in its target countries (Colombia, Ghana, Switzerland, and Côte d’Ivoire).