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Testing the Sensitivity of the IDELA to Capture Contextual Factors of the Home Learning Environment

Fri, March 22, 10:00 to 11:30am, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 2, Key 11

Integrative Statement

Over the past decade there has been a surge in interest in and research on early childhood development in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) as a foundational investment in countries’ economic development and prosperity. This has provided the impetus to move from one-dimensional interventions in health and nutrition to comprehensive services in early childhood development (Black & Dewey, 2014). Studies from the US have convincingly shown that economic hardship affects children through how it affects family functioning and parent-child interactions (Conger, Conger, & Martin, 2010). Yet few studies to date have looked at home learning environments and caregiver-child interactions in LMICs, and none have rigorously validated these constructs across such contexts. This paper investigates the factor structure and invariance of the home learning environment, and demonstrates that the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) and corresponding caregiver survey can be used to investigate the quality of home learning environments.

The IDELA is a multidimensional instrument to assess early development and learning across cultures. The corresponding caregiver survey captures a host of family and household characteristics, caregiver/parent-child interactions, and parental attitudes. This paper presents results from Bhutan, a small yet diverse country nestled in the Himalayas bordering Nepal, India, and China. The sample (1,326 children aged 3-6 years) was drawn from nine districts across the three regions of the country reflecting the substantial geographic, socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic diversity of the country. We use a structural equation modeling approach to investigate how contextual/household/family factors (household assets, stimulating learning activities, learning materials) directly and indirectly relate to gross/fine motor development, emergent language, emergent numeracy, and social-emotional development.

We find that the household assets are significantly associated with learning materials (β=0.6; p<0.000) and learning activities (β=0.38; p<0.000). We further find significant direct pathways from household assets to each of the four outcomes, and significant associations between learning activities and motor, social-emotional, and emergent language development with standardized coefficients ranging from 0.1 to 0.2 (0.0000

0.05). We find only one significant indirect pathway from household assets to social-emotional development partially mediated by learning activities. The overall model fit is good (RMSEA=0.014, CFI=0.961, and TLI=0.959).

[Figure 1]

These results support the notion that the quality of caregiver-child interactions seems to drive young children’s development across various developmental outcomes, and that a household’s wealth status yields independent associations with a child’s development. Post-hoc analyses of these household constructs however warrant a closer look at how we are gauging household wealth as this construct might be capturing other contextual factors, such as rural or urban residence.

Ultimately these analyses begin to validate the use of IDELA and its corresponding caregiver survey to better understand contextual factors that support children's learning in LMICs. IDELA is sensitive to variation in home learning environments and thus can be used to better understand what factors matter across cultural contexts, as well as to monitor and evaluate programs aimed at enhancing the home learning environment. Similar analyses from 900 children in Delhi, India are underway and will be presented.

Authors