Streetlight Project

A passerby sees a man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what he has lost. The man says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the passerby asks the man if he is sure he lost his keys by the streetlight, and the man replies, no, he lost them across the street in the park. The passerby asks the man why he is searching here, and the man replies, “this is where the light is.”

We know a lot about how children develop.  Developmental science has a rich history of studying a range of skills and competencies (e.g., problem-solving, social/relational skills, self-regulation, etc.) that children need to be successful across the lifecourse.  Nevertheless, we have a “streetlight effect” problem in our field, where we persistently judge the efficacy of early childhood interventions based on a small set of measures targeting a narrow range of skills (e.g., academic knowledge, behavior problems, etc.).  This myopic focus has led to a limited understanding of how our interventions shape the skills that children -- especially those from minoritized and otherwise under-represented communities -- need to be successful in the 21st century.

With funding from the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, researchers from the SEED Lab have teamed up with collaborators from Northwestern's DEEP Lab to redefine the Foundations of Learning and Development (FOLD Skills) that children need to be successful throughout life. To do so, we gathered evidence from both the existing scientific literature and from the lived experiences of non-academic child development experts (e.g., parents, teachers, clinicians, community leaders).  Moving forward, we are now focused on developing tools for measuring these critical FOLD competencies, and designing interventions that optimally support them.

Recent Publications

McCoy, D. C., & Sabol, T. J. (2025). Overcoming the Streetlight Effect: Shining light on the foundations of learning and development in early childhood. American Psychologist, 80(2), 135.

Ahun, M. N., McCoy, D. C., Sabol, T. J., Kim, Y., Warren, W., & Jeong, J. (2024). Overcoming the streetlight effect: Qualitative examination of community experts’ perceptions of foundations of learning and development (FOLD) skills. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1542(1), 647-659.