Janus – kindergarten population measure  

As I mentioned the EDI is not a test. So what’s not happening is the teacher would sit with the child one-to-one and give a child a task to do.  The EDI is based on questions that teachers should have been able to observe during the last four or five months of interaction with that child so they can really easily do it from memory. Once it’s done for each child in the classroom, the results are being aggregated, depending on how a community wants to use it, usually to the neighbourhood level. So we’re taking into account, not the child’s individual characteristics, but the child’s place where they live. And we put together a picture of how children are doing in this particular community: neighbourhood by neighbourhood.  

From then on, the data on children’s school readiness can be used in conjunction with all other data sources. We can look at the participation in library reading programs, we can look at the number of spaces in child care and learning centres, we can look at bus routes, we can look at presence of playgrounds.  We can look at many different things that are available in the community to see, perhaps, we can see certain patterns. The most obvious ones that happened in some communities, is lets say, you find that in some area the children’s language seems to be lagging behind, or communication issues. And we may find that within the last couple of years there has been a wave of new immigration to that area, so children really did not have a chance yet to learn English enough to participate in school-based activities.