Measuring and predicting early childhood development and its implications for the design of a home visiting program in Jordan

• In Event: Evidence based and culturally meaningful early childhood development programming and research in the Syrian response context

Proposal

Under Sesame Seeds, one of IRC’s direct services will be an evidence based home visiting program modelled after the Reach Up and Learn (RuL) (Jamaica) model (Grantham-McGregor, Powell, Walker, & Himes, 1991). Together with the RuL team the IRCs ECD technical unit has adapted the curriculum to the Jordanian Syrian Refugee context. Ongoing M&E and implementation research is providing input into fine tuning the program in preparation for a cluster randomized controlled trial as part of Sesame Seeds.
In identifying tools for M&E as well as in preparation for the impact evaluation we realized that there are few rigorously validated tools to directly assess young children’s development, caregiver wellbeing, the home environment, or the quality of home visits in the Arabic / Levant / Middle Eastern context. We are thus conducting a pilot study with current beneficiary children and their families in Jordan in order to a) ensure that we have a set of valid and sensitive tools for the evaluation of the Sesame Seeds Home Visiting program, and b) gain insights into the relationship between the quality of home visits and the home environment, and children’s early development and learning which will inform the design of the home visiting program to be tested in the RCT.
For the child development assessment, a team from the American University of Beirut is leading the translation, adaptation, and validation of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (3rd edition)(Albers & Grieve, 2007) for use with Syrian and Jordanian populations. The Bayley is a direct assessment of young children’s development, has been used in impact evaluations of home visiting programs around the world (Aboud & Akhter, 2011; Yousafzai et al., 2014), and is widely considered the “gold standard”. Alongside the Bayley we are conducting a caregiver survey to gauge the home environment and caregiver health and wellbeing. The caregiver survey draws from commonly used tools to assess mental health, stress, the refugee environment, war events exposure, social cohesion, self-efficacy, and the home learning environment. Caregiver-child interactions will be assessed using the Parent Interactions with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes (PICCOLO) (Roggman et al., 2013), a direct observation of caregivers and children engaging in a task. The quality of the home visit will be assessed using an adapted version of the Home Visiting Rating Scale (HOVERS).
This paper will present on the process of adapting and validating the Bayley and the home visit quality observation tool, and will present findings on the relations between quality of home visits and child cognitive and language outcomes. This paper will further investigate potential mediating effects of the quality of caregiver-child interactions using the PICCOLO, and moderating effects of caregivers’ mental health and other factors influencing the home environment.

Authors

• Alice Wuermli, University of California, Davis

• Pia Zeinoun, American University Beirut

• Kate Schwartz, New York University Steinhardt

• Anaga Ramachandran, NYU

• Joyce Rafla, New York University

• Casey Moran, New York University

• Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University