Collecting experimental cognitive data with young children usually requires undertaking one-on-one assessments, which can be both expensive and time-consuming. In addition, there is increasing acknowledgement of the importance of collecting larger samples for improving statistical power Button et al. (Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14(5), 365–376, 2013), and reproducing exploratory findings Open Science Collaboration (Science, 349(6251), aac4716–aac4716 2015). One way both of these goals can be achieved more easily, even with a small team of researchers, is to utilize group testing. In this paper, we evaluate the results from a novel tablet application developed for the Resilience in Education and Development (RED) Study. The RED-app includes 12 cognitive tasks designed for groups of children aged 7 to 13 to independently complete during a 1-h school lesson. The quality of the data collected was high despite the lack of one-on-one engagement with participants. Most outcomes from the tablet showed moderate or high reliability, estimated using internal consistency metrics. Tablet-measured cognitive abilities also explained more than 50% of variance in teacher-rated academic achievement. Overall, the results suggest that tablet-based, group cognitive assessments of children are an efficient, reliable, and valid method of collecting the large datasets that modern psychology requires. We have open-sourced the scripts and materials used to make the application, so that they can be adapted and used by others.

收集幼儿的实验性认知数据通常需要进行一对一的评估，这既昂贵又耗时。此外，人们越来越认识到收集更大样本以提高统计能力的重要性 Button 等人。（Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14 (5), 365–376, 2013）和复制探索性发现开放科学合作（Science , 349（6251），aac4716-aac4716 2015）。即使是一小群研究人员，也可以更轻松地实现这两个目标的一种方法是利用小组测试。在本文中，我们评估了为教育和发展 (RED) 研究开发的新型平板电脑应用程序的结果。RED 应用程序包括 12 项认知任务，专为 7 至 13 岁的儿童群体设计，让他们在 1 小时的学校课程中独立完成。尽管缺乏与参与者的一对一接触，但收集的数据质量仍然很高。平板电脑的大多数结果显示出中等或高可靠性，使用内部一致性指标估计。平板电脑测量的认知能力也解释了教师评定的学业成绩差异的 50% 以上。总体而言，结果表明基于平板电脑，儿童群体认知评估是收集现代心理学所需的大型数据集的一种有效、可靠和有效的方法。我们已经开源了用于制作应用程序的脚本和材料，以便其他人可以调整和使用它们。