The prizes were awarded every year until 2018. They are now awarded every two years, on alternating years. Each of the Best Practice Prize laureates is endowed with CHF 200’000 unrestricted funding. Up to ten prize finalists receive support for follow-up activities with the Foundation to promote evidence-based best practice in advancing child learning and education. The Jacobs Foundation Board of Trustees serves as the jury for the Best Practice Prizes.

Applications are now open

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The Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize acknowledges exceptional researchers who are making significant contributions in any scholarly discipline related to learning and development, or aimed at improving the living conditions of children and youth. 

The prize recipient receives an endowment worth 1 million Swiss Francs to support their research. 

The jury consists of a selected group of internationally renowned scientists working across a range of disciplines.

See the list of previous recipients of the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize.

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Variability is a common factor during childhood. Children’s abilities may vary within a classroom, within a social group or in different parts of a country or different regions of the world. Yet education systems are not designed to address children’s variable states, often offering inflexible instruction that does not fit the needs of most children at a given time. In addition, research usually focuses on group averages, short snapshots of time, and only one environment. There is also a lack of scientific evidence on the interplay between the different types of variability. We need this evidence to increase our understanding on why certain learning solutions might work for some individuals but not for others, or whether variability itself is different across groups or contexts.

LEVANTE aims to understand the nature of developmental variability. It will create a legal, ethical, and technical framework so that participating research teams can collect data from children ages 2-12 on a shared set of measurements. This data will be stored in a repository designed for open sharing and re-use, creating a unique resource for the study of variation in human development.

One key outcome of LEVANTE will be the creation of a uniquely large, well-curated, high value dataset to be used by researchers for years to come, with the main focus on learning variability. The LEVANTE Data Archive will not only facilitate the development of the science of learning variability, but help constitute the backbone of a larger multidisciplinary, multisectoral research community on learning variability working toward improving children’s learning and development globally.

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In May 2022, the Jacobs Foundation, launched LEAP (Leveraging Evidence for Action to Promote change), a global initiative that brings together researchers and social entrepreneurs to support education organizations to generate evidence and prove the effectiveness of their learning solutions. The initiative was developed in collaboration with MIT Solve.

In this year’s LEAP Challenge, the panel of expert judges selected 10 organizations from over 240 applications to become official 2023 LEAP Project Hosts. They will receive expertise from research and social entrepreneur fellows over the course of a 12-week project sprint, tailored strategies designed to strengthen their evidence base, and a $5,000 stipend.

I am excited and proud about the selection of LEAP hosts this year. The diversity of the organizations is fantastic and we are convinced that the upcoming projects will help them to support more children with better-evidenced learning opportunities!

Simon Sommer

Simon Sommer

Simon Sommer, Co-CEO of the Jacobs Foundation and member of the LEAP judging panel, said, “I am excited and proud about the selection of LEAP hosts this year. The diversity of the organizations is fantastic and we are convinced that the upcoming projects will help them to support more children with better-evidenced learning opportunities!” 

The 10 winning host organizations are:

• Thinkerbell Labs
• Dignitas Limited
• GLOT Inc
• Seenaryo
• Click Learning
• Aflatoun International
• Blue Butterfly
• Teach the World Foundation
• Luminos Fund
• Kenya Connect

Learn more here.

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Currie has developed new methods for assessing the effects of early interventions through her innovative use of administrative data such as natality and mortality records paired with new geocoding techniques. She and her colleagues have also identified “natural experiments”—such as bouts of expansion and retraction of public health insurance to pregnant people and children in the United States—that make it possible to evaluate the effects of large-scale social interventions on children’s physical, socio-behavioral, and economic outcomes.

Identifying Cost-Effective Interventions

Currie serves as co-director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton and co-directs the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Currie was the first woman chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006 to 2009, and chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014 to 2018. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015.

Her research on the effects of expanding Medicaid public health insurance for pregnant people and children in the 1990s in the United States provided some of the first evidence that expansion of coverage can reduce infant and child mortality and is one of the most cost-effective social interventions. These findings helped support the passage of the U.S. Affordable Care Act in 2014. Currie’s work on the U.S. Head Start early education program showed that a “fade-out” in the effects of the program on test scores was not evenly distributed among participants. Instead, she found that longer-term effects of the program on education completion and crime reduction are strongest for disadvantaged children, spurring an international interest in expanding early childhood interventions. Another major aspect of her research focuses on low levels of pollution exposure—from hazardous waste disposal to motor vehicle exhaust—during pregnancy, and its impacts on infant health at birth, especially among marginalized racial and ethnic communities.

Improving Child and Adolescent Mental Health

More recently, Currie has turned to the study of interventions aimed at improving child and adolescent mental health and training the next generation of researchers in this field. According to the World Health Organization, one in seven children 10-19 years of age is affected by a mental health disorder, but most of these disorders are unrecognized and untreated. Her research within the United States notes that when treatments for mental health disorders are prescribed, these treatments can differ substantially among children with the same diagnoses, depending on their geographical location and the training of their clinicians. “This is an area that is ripe for the use of new tools such as machine learning on large-scale administrative medical records, as I have been demonstrating in recent research,” explains Currie. “I would also like to explore a broader range of potential interventions, both with clinicians and through schools.”

Over the next five years Currie will focus on the extent to which interventions such as training, guidelines, and algorithm decision-making can improve clinical practice in treating mental health disorders. She will also examine the extent to which change in school environment and interventions in schools can affect child mental health at a population level. These interventions could include anti-bullying regulations, placement of mental health practitioners in schools, and reforming testing and tracking patterns that could be exacerbating mental health issues among students.

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The report discusses how learning and teaching must change if they are to keep pace with a fast-changing world and how progress in education is not possible without a deep understanding of learning processes, places and technologies, and an accurate understanding of policy-making and implementation – from preschool to parliament.

It describes how our Research Agenda aims to lay the foundation for this evidence-based transformation of education systems, which will provide young people with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and equitable opportunities they need to reach their learning potential and thrive.

By fostering and supporting positive forces in research and education, we can link evidence to action, and action to systems around the world.

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This document was developed by the Jacobs Foundation with input and feedback from more than 50 experts on learning and development. This research agenda is intended to establish a scientific basis for designing education systems and programming that consider variability, and to support a multidisciplinary research community that seeks to improve children’s learning and development globally. The agenda will be used by the Jacobs Foundation as a guiding framework for its research work and to serve as a public resource to inspire conversation among researchers and research funders on supporting and embracing learning variability in child development and education.

To cite this white paper, please use the following format

“Jacobs Foundation White Paper (2023). Advancing Research on Learning Variability. Research Agenda. Compiled by Tsang JM, Fetz-Fernandes G and Cubillo A. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.7753301″

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This document was developed by the Jacobs Foundation with input and feedback from more than 50 experts on learning and development. This research agenda is intended to establish a scientific basis for designing education systems and programming that consider variability, and to support a multidisciplinary research community that seeks to improve children’s learning and development globally. The agenda will be used by the Jacobs Foundation as a guiding framework for its research work and to serve as a public resource to inspire conversation among researchers and research funders on supporting and embracing learning variability in child development and education.

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