2.3 Monitoring early child development
If you don’t measure something, how do you know if it’s doing any good?” (Dr. Dan Offord, personal communication, 1998).
As the understanding of, and investment in, early child development increases, so does the desire and need to assess outcomes of interventions.
- What are our expectations and hopes for children?
- What do children need to be able to do at various ages in the early years?
- What do they need to know?
Defining and assessing indicators of early child learning and development can be a particularly difficult task. Early child care and education can include multiple goals, programs and services and much depends on the community, cultures and regional contexts. Standardized indicators for any one community or country may not be easily determined. Monitoring early child development is essential for decision-making about policies and financial resources. But more importantly, when we monitor how well children are doing in our communities and countries, we are paying attention to the quality of their lives.
Listen as Dr. Lia Fernald of the School of Public Health at the University of California Berkeley discusses some issues related to monitoring and evaluating program outcomes.
There are different scientifically acceptable methods for monitoring child development. Five approaches are described below:
1. The population-based survey approach uses aggregated assessments of individual children at a specific age and universal or almost universal points of contact such as birth or entry to school. It provides the most efficient ‘snap shot’ of children’s development at one point in time. The data can be analyzed at a country, state, local region, neighbourhood or service catchment area.
Listen now as Dr. Martin Guhn, member of the Canadian Council on the Social Determinants of Health, explains population-based data collection, its advantages and limitations.
Dr. Mariana Brussoni, the current director of the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP), outlines the key role population-level instruments play in their child monitoring system.
Visit their website to learn about each of the instruments.
The Early Development Instrument (EDI), developed in Canada and widely used there and elsewhere to get a snapshot of development of kindergarten-age children, is one example of a population-based survey tool.
Listen as Dr. Magdalena Janus, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster University, explains the EDI.
As EDI data collection continues, it is interesting to observe broad patterns. In the next video, Dr. Kimberly Shonert-Reichl, the NoVo Foundation Endowed Chair in Social and Emotional Learning and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago; Former Applied Developmental Psychologist and a Professor in the Human Development, Learning, and Culture area in the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC); and the Former Director of the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) in the School of Population and Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at UBC, discusses the Wave 6 results in British Columbia.
Schonert-Reichl says that while vulnerability in language and cognitive development seems to be decreasing, there is increased vulnerability among 5-year in the domains of emotional maturity and social competence. She suggests some reasons for this change. Do you agree with the reasons she suggests?
Think about social changes in the last decade, where you live. How might they contribute to or hinder children’s emotional and social development?
Wave 8 results in British Columbia are available on the HELP website. Explore the EDI dashboard to look at different waves, and to view data by communities or boundaries such as school districts.
Watch a short video from the EDI website about why EDI data collection is important for supporting healthy child development and then listen to Janus describe some of the ways the instrument is used in other countries.
This interactive map illustrates where and how EDI has been implemented around the world.
The Middle Years Development Instrument (MDI) is a survey completed by students. Listen now as Guhn explains the types of questions on the MDI and the grades that are targeted.
In the next two videos, Guhn points out that the MDI results highlight that social relationships are extremely important to children’s well-being in the school years. Listen as he explains these results and how teachers and school administrators are using the data to make improvements for students.
2. The social indicators approach is an opportunistic mix of data from various available sources, including census surveys, household surveys or multiple indicator cluster surveys (MICS).
The State of The World’s Children is an example of the social indicators approach. For more than 30 years, UNICEF has published yearly reports of statistics that provide a picture of children’s circumstances and well-being. Each year the report focuses on a different key issue affecting children around the world. The 2023 report focused on vaccinations, illustrating how the pandemic set back immunization rates in many countries around the world. Data about mental health, the focus of the 2021 report, was used to create a dynamic and interactive website.
In 2019, the report focused on malnutrition. In 2017, the report focused on children in a digital world.
3. The longitudinal study and approach is a systematic follow-up of a representative sample of a given population of children and their families. These children may be followed for years, even most of their lives. Longitudinal studies provide the most detailed information on the diverse trajectories of children’s development.
Dr. Meghan Azad is a research scientist at the Children’s Hospital Research Institute of Manitoba. Listen to her explanation of the importance of longitudinal studies.
The CHILD Cohort Study has followed 3500 Canadian families since 2009. Listen to Dr. Azad provide an overview of this study. Then, visit the CHILD Study interactive website to learn about current projects and key findings. Be sure to explore the infographics, and to watch their award-winning videos.
In the Ecology module (page 2.3) you learned about the Carolina Abecedarian Project as an example of an evidence-based intervention for young children. The fact that the original group of children have been followed for 40 years means that this is also an example of a longitudinal study. Dr. Joe Sparling, one of the investigators and developers of the program, outlines the research design of the project, highlighting the success they have had in following the original children. Explore the Carolina Abecedarian Program website to learn more about results at ages 12, 15, 21, 30 and 35.
Another example of a longitudinal study is Étude longitudinale du développement des enfants du Québec or Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (ÉLDEQ/QLSCD). In the first phase of this study, over 2000 children born in 1997 and 1998 were tracked from five months to four years of age. Researchers continue to analyze these data to look at questions related to child well-being and various social environments. Subsequent phases involve data collection every 2 years. ÉLDEQ/QLSCD is now in its fourth phase and in 2021 another round of data was collected from the participants, now young adults.
The information collected during the fourth phase of the study will be used to continue monitoring various aspects of social adjustment and well-being in youth. Certain new realities that can arise in early adulthood will be examined, such as work, studies, relationships with parents and friends, romantic relationships, finances, lifestyle habits, career choices, and health and well-being. The young participants become the only respondents” (Institut de la Statistique Quebec, 2021, para. 2).
For more information, including data collection methods, visit the website.
Evidence about individual and population developmental trajectories, from both small studies of individual children and large population surveys, is clear and points in the same direction:
- It is important to support development that is going in the right direction and alter development that may be problematic. The potential is there to improve overall development of a community and society by working with individual children and families.
- During the early years, developmental trajectories are easier to move around than they seem to be later in life. For example, helping a preschool child learn to find ways of getting along with other children is much easier than changing physically aggressive behaviour in later childhood.
- Interactions with young children that support optimal development are also effective interventions that support children who are having difficulties.
4. A linked data approach uses routinely-collected population-wide administrative data from health, education and other sources and integrates them to provide developmental trajectories for learning, behaviour and health. In the next two videos, Meghan Azad explains how this approach has been used to add to the richness of the CHILD Cohort Study.
The Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) has also linked EDI results to administrative data sets. Dr. Brussoni shares examples of what has been learned from 20 years of EDI data, and how that is enriched when linked to other data sets.
Linked data sets are an efficient way to build detailed information about developmental trajectories. The Manitoba Centre for Health Policy (MCHP) specializes in using a linked data approach to conduct population-based research on health, and the social determinants of health. This data is intended to support the development of evidence-informed policy, programs and services that maintain and improve the health and well-being of Manitobans.
Dr. Marni Brownell, senior research scientist and associate director of research at the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy, discusses the linked data approach and compares it to the use of surveys to study population health.
The following research summaries describe studies done by the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy using a linked data approach.
5. The environmental scan approach monitors the quality, use and availability of programs and services available in a community, region, state or country. Data and information about what programs and services exist, how they are being used by families, how they operate and how much they cost allows communities and policy makers to better understand the relationships among children’s developmental outcome data, demographic characteristics and available resources.
The Early Childhood Education Report measures the quality, use and availability of early childhood education in Canada. It has been released every three years, beginning in 2011. Provincial/territorial early years services are evaluated using a 15-point scale with 21 benchmarks. The benchmarks are organized into five categories:
- governance
- funding
- access
- learning environment
- accountability
In the next video Dr. Emis Akbari, a senior policy fellow at the Atkinson Centre, University of Toronto, and co-author of Early Childhood Education Report (2014, 2017, 2020, 2023), provides an overview of this report. In the second video, she describes each of the benchmarks of quality used in the ECER and how they were identified.
Review the Early Childhood Education Report website to learn more about the benchmarks and to explore 2023 results.
Do you think that the ECE Report is a useful tool to monitor how the provinces and territories are doing across Canada?
According to the ECE Report what are the differences in how early childhood education is delivered across Canada?
Compare Quebec and Alberta. What are the differences?
Want to know more? Global monitoring
The Multiple Indicator Cluster surveys (MICS), has been collected by UNICEF in over 300 countries for more than 20 years. Watch the video on the link below to learn more about MICS and how these survey findings have influenced policy change.
In 2014, in anticipation of the coming Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with increased emphasis on early child development, a global group led by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the World Bank, the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution and UNICEF, came together to “promote feasible, accurate and useful measurement of children’s development and learning at the start of primary school, and of the quality of their pre-primary learning environments” (UNESCO, 2017, p. 7). The Measurement of Early Learning and Quality Outcomes (MELQO) initiative focused on using the best of existing proven tools while ensuring the flexibility for contextualization for different communities and maintaining technical rigour. The tools were then field tested in a number of countries in 2015 and 2016.
To learn more, read pages 1 – 26 (the overview and description of the development of the MELQO modules) and pages 71 – 95 (about the Measuring of Early Learning Environments (MELE) module.
The Nurturing Care Framework developed by UNICEF, WHO (World Health Organization) and other partners with several proposed strategic actions is referred to as a strong, new “roadmap for action” (Nurturing Care Framework, 2018a, p. 1). Rather than developing all new indicators, the framework, which complements the SDGs, suggests global indicators from the SDGs and MICs as well as others. (There will be more information about the Nurturing Care Framework on page 3.3 of this module). See pages 48 and 49 in the document to read about new indicators to monitor healthy child development.
Want to know more? Indicators and outcomes
Policy makers need to find a balance between data that can be compared across countries and regions and data that is local and more sensitive to the context of children’s and families’ daily lives. Work to date offers a selection of viable child development outcomes, service delivery quality measures and community performance indicators.
How well are children in your community doing as compared with other similar communities?
Is access to early childhood programs (prenatally to school age) comparable?
What about poverty rates? How does your community compare to others?
What other aspects of your community make it a better, or worse place for children? Is there a child-friendly or family-friendly culture in your community?
Dr. Jody Heymann, distinguished professor and former dean of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, discusses the value of comparable data.
Heymann goes on to make the case for monitoring child outcomes beyond survival before they begin school.
Dr. Kofi Marfo, founding director of the Institute for Human Development at Aga Khan University, proposes a compromise between common, comparable data as well as local data that catches those things that are important.
In the interview, Marfo states: “…if my goal is to create a scientific database that allows us to understand what is common across our universe…. But it will also mean that we will have to be ignoring a lot of things that are very important but are localized, so localized that you cannot measure it in the same way across context.”
- Can you think about indicators that matter to early child development that are specific to your community?
- Are you familiar with tools that measure aspects of child development outcomes?
- Have you used them in your work?
- What do you see as the benefits and limitations?
- What is the compromise that Kofi suggests?
In the next clip, Marfo discusses the difficulties in finding comparable data, even when researchers and policy-makers have the best intentions.
