Validity for What? Challenges and Opportunities in Direct Assessment of Young Children Internationally and at Scale

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Over the past ten years, direct measurement of children’s early childhood development (ECD) outcomes in lower-and middle-income countries has proliferated. Tools designed specifically for use in developing contexts such as the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) and the Measure of Development and Early Learning Outcomes (MODEL), to name only two, have allowed researchers and evaluators to improve research on the effects of programs and policies and investigate the determinants of healthy child development internationally (Fernald et al., 2017).

Despite enormous progress in the measurement of child developmental outcomes internationally, challenges remain for the field with regard to establishing the predictive validity, practical utility, and comparability of measures. The papers on this panel seek to address these challenges by 1) presenting the results of a predictive validity study of IDELA, the first for a direct ECD assessment designed for use in LMICs; 2) examining the potential of creating a short form IDELA for wider use in large-scale data collection; and 3) the work of an initiative seeking to better integrate ECD assessments globally through the use of common items.

This panel comprises a group of stakeholders working on ECD measurement in non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and academia. In doing so, we bring diverse international perspectives on ECD measurement and highlight the challenges and opportunities for building validity evidence for a range of uses of internally used assessments of early childhood developmental outcomes.

Sub Unit

• Methods, History, Theory

Chair

• Dana Charles McCoy, Harvard University

Discussant

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Longitudinal Evidence on the Predictive Validity of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) - Presenting Author: Lauren Pisani, University College London (UCL); Non-Presenting Author: Jonathan Seiden, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania

• Approaches and Considerations for Short Forming Internationally Used Direct Assessments of Early Childhood Development - Presenting Author: Jonathan Seiden, Harvard University

• Measuring Early Childhood Development Among 4-6 year Olds: The Identification of Psychometrically Robust Items Across Diverse Contexts - Presenting Author: Diego Armando Luna Bazaldua, World Bank - District of Columbia; Non-Presenting Author: Adelle Pushparatnam, World Bank - District of Columbia