The use of IDELA for monitoring quality of early childhood development programs at systems-level in Colombia

• In Event: Leveraging the potential of data to advance early learning and development: celebrating a decade of IDELA and unfolding future prospects

Proposal

One of the main challenges to achieve the SDG agenda is to scale evidence-based programs to ensure that all children have access to early childhood education to achieve their full developmental potential. Scaling-up require national-level monitoring systems that include the assessment of the program (inputs) and of children’s outcomes (outputs). In Colombia, the national law ‘De Cero a Siempre’ provides a holistic framework to ensure developmental opportunities to socioeconomically vulnerable children 0-5 years and establishes mechanisms for evaluation, monitoring and local control to follow-up the implementation of the early childhood policy. During the last 7 years, with the leadership of the Ministry of Education, the country has defined a model for measuring the quality of early childhood education that led to the design of a monitoring tool to assess quality (IMCEIC) to be applied in tandem with IDELA as a child outcome measure.

In this presentation we will describe the use of IDELA in Colombia in two contexts. First, to monitor public policy and verify the association between quality and child development in services that are already at a national scale. In this context, IDELA has been used as a children's outcomes measure in two studies with nationally representative samples of early childhood services: a) the national study of the quality of early childhood education in 2017 with a sample of 3,687 children 3-5 years (the first follow up will be conducted by the end of 2023); b) the national study of the quality of kindergarten carried out in 2021 with a sample of 1864 children 5-6 years. Second, to evaluate the result of scaling up small-scale professional development programs to improve the quality of early childhood education. In this context, IDELA has been used to assess the developmental outcomes of children whose teachers were participating in professional development programs to improve the quality of pedagogical practices. Data was collected in two different studies in 2019 (N = 360) and 2021 (N = 160) across two cities to describe the associations between the quality of pedagogical practices and changes in 3 to 5 years-old children’s development.

We will present descriptive analysis of the results of IDELA across these samples of Colombian children, and the associations with quality measures. We will also analyze the process by which IDELA was selected, adapted, and validated as a tool to assess children's development in the country. We will highlight the enablers and challenges that the use of IDELA has faced in Colombia, as the introduction of an outcomes measure in tandem with a quality measure represented a paradigm shift in the country. Finally, we will discuss how we have supported the use of IDELA as part of the design of quality monitoring systems in other countries of the region (Perú, México) and the lessons learned in this process with relevance to the Latin American and global context.

Authors

• Carolina Maldonado-Carreño, Universidad de Los Andes

• Eduardo Escallon, Universidad de los Andes

• Tiffany Jiménez, Universidad de Los Andes