The EDI was developed in Canada and it\u2019s a very, what you would call Western-developed tool, as the majority of child development instruments are. So when you go into a different country, or into a different culture within the same country \u2013 so for Australia we\u2019ve done quite a lot of work around our indigenous adaptation of the EDI, as well as. And you have a whole series of steps that you really need to go through, from a scientific point of view to be able to validate the instrument in that new culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You go through a series of what you call content validity to start with which is basically taking the questionnaire to a group of professionals that are, you know, from that culture and you go through item by item and say \u2018does this make sense to you\u2019, \u2018how do we translate to the question\u2019 making sure the intent of the question is right. So changes to the core questions can be made at that stage, we try and maintain as many as we can for consistency, and there\u2019s about 48 items out of the 104 EDI items where we\u2019re pretty strict to say \u2018we need to make these pretty consistent so that we can still do international comparison, cross cultural comparison. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we find a lot of the changes that the countries or the different cultures come up with are around the explanation of the intent of every one of the questions. So in Australia for our indigenous adaptation of the EDI we have a very comprehensive set of teacher guidelines, and we\u2019ve made quite a lot of enhancements to those teacher guidelines. So for each question where we think culture might actually have an influence in how a teacher actually writes that child on that specific item on the EDI, we actually have quite a bit of a description around what the teacher really needs to think about before actually completing the question, trying to minimize that teacher judgment around culture. So we really are assessing children\u2019s development, behaviour, skills, rather than culture. We can add a cultural lens to it but we\u2019re still being able to make those comparisons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So many of the challenges is, in starting in a new country, and, particularly more challenging in the developing country, is the very difference in culture, the great difference in context. So the school systems tend to be quite different. The access to schools tend to be quite different. So in both Australia and Canada, and now the United States, where we have the biggest pick-up of the EDI, the systems are all relatively similar. All children tend to be going to school by four or five years of age. There\u2019s no gender imbalance in terms of access to school. There are fairly consistent curriculum standards and expectations of what school really requires in terms of child development and skills, is fairly similar across the countries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So when we go into a new country with an instrument that is essentially trying to measure brain development, or holistically how the child is developing at the age of, for three to six, really is the age range that we use with the EDI. We have to take into account the school systems, other children going to school to start with, if the children are going to school, they, is it just the rich or is it the poor, or is it just the males or are females coming as well, because as a population health measure, you\u2019re wanting to get all children across a geographical area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If school is actually not a universal access system, and in some of the developing countries it\u2019s not, we are challenged with the EDI administratively in terms of thinking about how we would actually be able to use the instrument which is why, in Indonesia, we\u2019re using parents like interviewers, are actually interviewing parents and going through the EDI \u2013 and for some of the actually task-based questions as our reliability measure, we\u2019re actually trying to get the children to do some of the things that we expect and actually see if we have some reliability measure there as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The EDI was developed in Canada and it\u2019s a very, what you would call Western-developed tool, as the majority of child development instruments are. So when you go into a different country, or into a different culture within the same country \u2013 so for Australia we\u2019ve done quite a lot of work around our indigenous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1881","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1881"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1882,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1881\/revisions\/1882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}