1-142 - Challenges and Promising Directions in Global Measurement of Early Childhood Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

The vital importance of early childhood experiences for influencing outcomes in later life has largely been accepted as common wisdom by the global community. This was recently signified by the United Nations in 2015 calling for countries to “ensure all children have access to quality expanded access to [early childhood] care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education” as one of their Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The goal comes with a requirement for countries to report on the percentage of children under 5 years of age who are “developmentally on track.” Defining and measuring developmentally on track, however, is fraught, requiring first agreement about what it means for a child to be “on track”, and then periodic, nationally representative assessment of child-level outcomes across multiple domains, among them health, learning and psychosocial well-being. Furthermore, few countries consistently measure child-level outcomes of children under 5 and there is no single global instrument administered in all countries. This panel describes a promising measurement approach, the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes (MELQO) instrument, presents nationally representative MELQO data from a developing country, looks at early executive function tasks across countries, and examines the challenge of understanding whether the US preschool population is “on track.”

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chair

• Maureen Black, University of Maryland and RTI International

Individual Presentations

• Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes: Common approaches to indicator development - Presenting Author: Abbie Raikes, University of Nebraska College of Public Health

• The state of early learning in Tanzania: Utilization of the MELQO tools with a nationally representative sample of children - Katherine Merseth, RTI International; Presenting Author: Tara Weatherholt, RTI International

• Executive Function Tasks across US and Tanzanian Contexts - Presenting Author: Michael Willoughby, RTI International

• Can the U.S. Assess Developmentally “On Track” in Early Childhood? A Look at the Available Data - Presenting Author: Jean Lennon, RTI International; Amanda Wylie, RTI International