Measuring early childhood development in Rohingya refugee contexts: Adaptation and validation of the IDELA with extensions

• In Event: Stronger evidence for the most vulnerable children: promising practices in assessing developmental outcomes in humanitarian settings and other vulnerable contexts

Proposal

Over the past 20 years, there have been increasing efforts to develop Early childhood development (ECD) measures to inform policy and practice, especially for countries in the global south, related to nurturing care and early childhood – across health, nutrition, education, social protection, and child protection (Yoshikawa et al., 2018). In addition, non-governmental organizations (NGO) and governments alike are increasingly interested in a rigorous assessment of such domains of ECD as well, for purposes of early childhood program evaluation and outcome measurement.
The most widely used direct ECD assessment measure in global south countries is the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA), developed by Save the Children (Pisani et al., 2018). Since its development, it has been utilized in many countries around the world, including by governments for national monitoring (Wolf et al., 2017; Maldonado et al., 2021). Children's ability to develop skills and attitudes is affected by their immediate environment. Any tool employed to measure children's skills, therefore, must be sensitive to the local context of those children. With this consideration, the goal of this study was to adapt the IDELA for the Rohingya child context in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The primary rationale for adaptations is threefold, as follows: a) Addition of Executive Function Domain, b) Cultural, Contextual, and Linguistic, and c) Age Range: IDELA was designed and validated for children from 3.5 to 6 years old. In IDELA-E, we studied children from 3-year old.
In this paper, we describe our process of adapting of child direct assessment tool for emergency context to measure the development of Rohingya children residing in refugee camps in Bangladesh. This IDELA-E consists of 30 interactive assessment activities to measure children in five domains: motor function, socio-emotional, emergent literacy, emergent numeracy, and executive functioning development. A total of 282 child assessments were completed during this study. Data collections were overall stratified into four age groups (36 to 42, 43 to 48, 49 to 54, 55 to 60 months; each roughly one-quarter of the sample), gender, and camp types, for example: camps with/without childcare services..
Findings show that all domain-level mean scores showed variability and approximated normal distributions, reflecting good between-child discrimination. When separated into age-bands, the stratified data yielded increasing domain level scores in older children for all domains, showing a strong linear developmental progression for each. Findings suggested that Rohingya children’s development, with modest variations, across all five domains by age group. Results also indicated model fit with good reliability, consistency, and construct validity.
This study highlights that children’s ability to develop skills and attitudes is affected by their immediate environment. Therefore, any tool employed to measure children’s development must be sensitive and adapted to the local context of those children. Beyond cultural and linguistic adaptations, context determinants and child population characteristics are essential to consider when assessing child development. Our research yields that tool adaptation is a critical part of the research process in emergency contexts yet often requires more efforts to achieve high child assessment quality.

Authors

• Maung Nyeu, Global TIES for Children, New York University

• Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Global TIES for Children, New York University