Bridging Language, Culture, and Constructs: Implementing LEARN and Advancing Child Development Research in the Latin American Context

• In Event: Building Equitable Research Ecosystems to Understand Learning Variability

Proposal

Latin America has historically been underrepresented in global child development research. Yet the region faces profound challenges that make such research particularly urgent: high levels of poverty and social inequity continue to shape children’s developmental trajectories and limit opportunities for learning. Building equitable research ecosystems requires addressing linguistic, cultural, and structural asymmetries that constrain participation from diverse contexts. Colombia provides a compelling case study of how global initiatives can be reinterpreted locally to bridge language, culture, and constructs, advancing both national capacity and international science.
LEARN was launched in Colombia in partnership with Universidad de los Andes to nurture early-career scholars. It has an explicit commitment to language inclusion: training and mentoring activities are conducted in Spanish, lowering barriers to participation, while bilingual strategies—including the translation of materials and support for English language development—equip fellows to access and contribute to global academic networks. Beyond language, the program emphasizes rigorous methodological training, including workshops on psychometrics, measurement, and research design, which strengthen participants’ technical skills and ensure they can contribute to research on learning variability. Equally important, LEARN connects local scholars with a vibrant regional network of Latin American mentors, as well as internationally recognized researchers through professional societies such as SRCD, ISSBD, and the Jacobs Foundation conferences. This combination of advanced training, language accessibility, and mentorship enables scholars to design and conduct research that is simultaneously grounded in local educational realities and positioned within global scientific debates.
These efforts build on earlier national initiatives to strengthen measurement systems in Colombia. For example, the country’s adaptation of the international MELQO framework (Pongutá et al., 2019) demonstrated that the legitimacy of assessment tools depends on collaborative ownership and the involvement of domestic researchers, ministries, and universities. More recently, Colombia has been a pilot site for LEVANTE, an initiative focused on the translation, adaptation, and validation of child development measures with potential to produce globally relevant datasets. However, as analyses of Colombia’s monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems underscore (González et al., 2024), the production and use of evidence in the country are deeply shaped by centralization, entrenched privilege, and regional disparities in resources and technical capacity. Rather than democratizing access to knowledge, M&E systems often reinforce inequalities, raising critical questions about who produces, owns, and benefits from data. Addressing these challenges requires strengthening researchers’ capacity to ensure that evidence is both valid and locally meaningful.
The Colombian experience illustrates that equitable research ecosystems require more than adapting tools to new contexts: they demand local ownership of data and evidence. Without this, information risks being extractive, losing both validity and relevance. LEARN represents a concrete step toward shifting this dynamic by cultivating a new generation of scholars equipped with methodological expertise, linguistic and cultural access, and strong professional networks. By empowering Colombian researchers to generate, interpret, and disseminate evidence, LEARN contributes to a more inclusive global science of child development—one in which local voices, capacities, and perspectives are central to advancing knowledge and shaping policies.

Authors

• Carolina Maldonado-Carreño, Universidad de Los Andes

• Eduardo Escallon

• Juliana Sanchez, Universidad de los Andes

• Priyamvada Tiwari, NYU Global TIES for Children