SRL PROJECT
 The
Early Development Instrument (EDI) is
a short, teacher-completed
instrument
which measures Children’s readiness to
learn at school in five domains: physical health
and well-being; social knowledge and competence;
emotional health/maturity; language and cognitive
development; and general knowledge and communication
skills. A full description of the development
of the EDI can be found in the project
description.
The instrument has been designed
to provide information for groups of children in
order to:
- report on
populations of children in different communities,
- assess the strengths and deficits in students,
and
- predict how children will do in
elementary school.
The instrument's name: “Early
Development Instrument: A Population-based Measure
for Communities” (EDI)
reflects the fact that it measures the outcome
of the early years. At the same time, however,
it provides information on children’s readiness
to learn at school. This refers to a child’s
ability to meet the task demands of school, such
as: playing and working with other children, listening
to the teacher, remembering and following rules,
and being comfortable exploring and asking questions.
The EDI consists of 104 core questions grouped
into five scales and two indicators of special
skills and special problems. Testing to date has
demonstrated that the EDI has good internal and
test-retest reliability, and external validity.
The average time for completion
per student is reported at 20 minutes (according
to teachers),
and teachers may refer to a guide
for teachers which was developed to facilitate the completion
of the EDI. The questionnaire is completed in the
second half of the kindergarten year (February/March).
The Offord
Centre for Child Studies, at McMaster
University, is a national repository of the EDI
data. The majority of the Early Development Instrument
data is also processed at the Centre. Once data
has been collected and analysed, each site receives
a report consisting of four separate documents:
- Demographic frequency tables and simple comparisons
for all students in the sites (e.g., girls vs.
boys);
- Descriptive report which
puts the site results in perspective;
- Behavioural profiles of children with the highest and lowest scores
for each scale;
- School-level reports,
which are one-page summaries of each school
EDI data,
including frequencies of all demographic
variables, means, standard deviations, and
percentages of students scoring in various percentile
ranges
for each scale.
The Early
Development Instrument can be viewed online, and a short “Factsheet” containing
the description of the finalized scales
is also available.
At the completion of the 2003/04 school year,
the total number of children in the EDI database
was approximately 293,000. The Progress
to date in terms of the number of communities and students
per year where the EDI has been administered provides
more details.
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