Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE)

Overview

The Jacobs Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the 2026 Call for Proposals, with a total funding pool of USD 6 million and individual funding of up to USD 1 million to support projects to join the Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) initiative. This is an exciting opportunity for researchers to contribute to deepening our understanding of how children grow, learn, and develop across different times, places, and contexts.

LEVANTE is an initiative of the Jacobs Foundation. It brings together researchers from around the globe to coordinate data collection on how individual variability, group heterogeneity, and contextual variability influence children’s learning and development outcomes. LEVANTE has enabled the creation of the first cross-cultural, multidisciplinary open dataset capturing the diversity of child development, with the goal of generating key insights to improve our understanding of learning variability and its association with learning outcomes worldwide.

This year, LEVANTE is seeking proposals for research projects that assess children aged 3 to 12 over time, focused on identifying underlying factors contributing to learning variability, and capturing the dynamic processes of learning through dense measurement approaches. We particularly encourage proposals that:

• Incorporate designs that have the potential to establish causal inferences on mechanisms underlying learning and development, or generate insights into how environmental and contextual factors, such as pollution, socio-economic conditions, and institutional reforms, contribute to shaping learning.
• Implement designs that use rigorous and dense data collection measures to study the links between short-term behavior and long-term outcomes, or advance our understanding of within-child variability and developmental trajectories using rich environmental data.

The call also encourages submissions from projects in underrepresented regions.

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  

Award(s)
Regular projects: Maximum budget: $250,000 over a minimum of 2-3 years (data collection at baseline, followed by two annual waves)   
Large projects: Maximum budget: $600,000 over a minimum of 4 years (data collection at baseline, followed by three annual waves)
Infrastructure projects: Maximum budget: $1,000,000 over a minimum of 4 years (data collection at baseline, followed by three annual waves)