Janus – EDI explained

The full name of the EDI is Early Development Instrument: A population-based measure for communities. It started in the late 90’s as a response to an overwhelming request from communities to be able to keep score on children in their communities, not just individual children but whole groups of children at a time. So we’ve done some research and we found out that while there were plenty of excellent individual measures to assess child’s progress and development, none of them were cheap enough and feasible enough to aggregate to population level. And that’s why the concept of Early Development Instrument has been conceived.  

Early Development Instrument is a checklist that’s completed by kindergarten teachers in the second half of the kindergarten year and it’s qualities of this instrument that provides a holistic assessment of child development based on the fact that all major domains of child development are included. So, while the concept of school readiness used to be a very narrow concept, usually focused on how many letters a child can recognize, whether a child can count to ten.   

We’re really covered on the whole spectrum of child development from a child’s physical health and adjustment to school, a child’s gross and fine motor development: the ability to hold a pencil, ability to hop on the playground, the ability to keep the energy up throughout the whole school day, through social competence and emotional maturity: ability to work with other children, ability to, every now and then, show some helping behaviour, some social behaviour to their peers, ability to hold their anger, ability not to show temper tantrums, to the kind of more obvious more traditional areas of what school readiness use to be  considered before: like language and cognitive development as well as communication. What’s important when children enter school is that they’re understood by others. Not just by their parents, not just by the people who are around them all the time but also by teachers and by other children.  As well as what’s important, is the children understand their peers and their teachers.