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The measurement of child development in the field and its use for policy evaluation

Wed, April 17, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific J

Proposal

Promoting child development is one of the most important roles that policy plays in high, middle and low income countries; these policies increase well-being and reduce inequality throughout the life course and across generations (Dodge and Haskins, 2015). Across the social and biological sciences measurement for understanding the process of child development continues to present serious challenges to sustained progress in the area (Rubio-Codina et al, 2016). Lack of adequate measures to capture relevant developmental domains, comparability across time and data sources, and measurement error, make it difficult to synthesize existing evidence across studies and to draw policy conclusions. To design comprehensive and effective policy responses, we need more research in measurement in the development of tools and techniques to overcome critical challenges in measurement of key constructs in research on child development. We will present a couple of studies that address these challenges. For both studies, novel measurements were used to evaluate different programs which aim to improve child development.

In the first study, a cluster-randomized control trial (C-RCT) was used to evaluate the impact of a low-cost community-run playscheme implemented by the NGO Lively Minds in rural Ghana in 2017. As part of the intervention, caregivers were trained to run educational Play Schemes in local preschools with children ages 4-6 years and were offered a monthly parenting workshop. Three survey data collection rounds were collected: baseline, follow-up 1 and 2. The outcome measures were children’s cognitive, executive function and socio-emotional development, assessed using i) the IDELA (Pisani et al., 2015) which includes measures of emergent numeracy, emergent literacy and socio-emotional skills, and ii) executive function tasks adapted to the context which includes measures of emergent numeracy (point to number, extra number, number comparison task and geometric intruder). After 6 months, moderate statistically significant improvement is found in children’s school readiness which disaggregates into statistically significant improvements in most constituent domains including moderate increases in numeracy and literacy and a small increase in executive functioning.

In the second study, an RCT was used to measure the causal impact on households of the offer of either in-kind asset transfer or unconditional cash transfer (UCT) in Pakistan at the beginning of 2014. Currently, we aim to assess the impact of the program on the development of children of the recipients of the programs. We assess the children’s development using the IDELA, a Math Facts Fluency and a matrices tasks, on children aged between 3 and 8. The effect of social protection programs on the development and well-being of young children is of the utmost importance to research and policy alike. This study will be able to explicitly assess the extent to which transforming disadvantaged households’ economic conditions through asset transfers and UCT can break a key pathway that sustains the intergenerational transmission of poverty whereby children from more disadvantaged households are exposed to unstimulating home environments and therefore do not reach their developmental potential, are more likely to underperform in school and to live in poverty as adults.

Authors