Direct assessment of children: construction of a new instrument from the Dimensional Inventory for Child Development Assessment

• In Event: The developing of instruments to evaluate child development in Brazil

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Child development is intense and is influenced by several protective and risk factors. Negative child development results can be minimized when delays or problems are detected and treated early. Therefore, regular monitoring of development is essential to the child's well-being and health. Brazilian instruments for child assessment are scarce, especially those that cover various ages and are culturally adapted. In a previous study, the authors of this work constructed the Dimensional Inventory for Child Development Assessment (IDADI). It is an instrument for assessing children from 4 to 72 months of age through parental reporting, covering the following domains: Cognitive, Socio-emotional, Motor Skills, Communication and Language, and Adaptive Behavior. Direct assessment of the child, by performing tasks, is also an important resource to complement the assessment. For this reason, IDADI items are being transformed into tasks for the professional to directly assess the child's skills. The objective of this work is to present the initial version of the tasks.
Methods and Preliminary results: For the construction, content analysis of the items from the inventory was performed to select those that most discriminate the children's developmental skills and that had the best prospects of being transformed into tasks. From this analysis, the development of a stimulus book containing items that the child responds began, allowing him to evaluate his development. The stimulus book aims to contemplate as many images as possible from the Brazilian context and reduce costs with other materials in the evaluation. It mainly contains drawings made using a graphics tablet and the Paint Tool SAI program. So that they can be manipulated in the assembly of the tasks without changing the quality, and to maintain the quality and the standard between the drawings, they are all made on a large screen of the same size (3000 x 3000 pixels). They are made by a single person, who maintain the same style of drawing and painting. To test the adequacy of the tasks, pre-pilots are being carried out, through focus group sessions with children aged four to 72 months. Pre-pilots have been instrumental in changing the instructions and stimuli used. The next steps are to finish the stimulus book and other necessary tasks and refer it to expert judges in the areas of child development and psychological assessment.
Conclusion: It is expected, with these procedures, to guarantee evidence of content validity to IDADI’s direct assessment version.

Author

• Monia Aparecida Silva, Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei
  Presenting Author