GUIDELINES FOR THE USE OF THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT INSTRUMENT (EDI)

The Early Development Instrument is an approximately 100-question behavioural checklist designed at the Offord Centre for Child Studies, (OCCS), McMaster University, to measure readiness to learn at school of children between 4 and 6 years of age. It was designed primarily for use with whole populations of children (based on geographical or administrative boundaries) and cannot be interpreted at an individual level for a diagnostic purpose. It can, however, be used as a research tool.

The first set of general guidelines below refers to the use at both levels: the community-wide implementation and the research use, and it is followed by additional specific ones for either community-wide or research use.

1. The data collected with the EDI is shared with the OCCS (an electronic copy of the raw data is shared with the OCCS), following a signed agreement.
2. The data is collected in the spring of the kindergarten year (JK or SK-level), no earlier than January and no later than April.
3. The EDI data is never used at an individual level for any diagnostic purposes (e.g., one cannot use the EDI questionnaire to indicate that a child has a learning disability). It could be used for matching data from other sources (e.g., birth weight information, or results from other school-directed testing), but only if the resulting analyses are based on group comparisons, and the anonymity of the EDI scores is preserved.
4. If the EDI data is linked with any other data for research purposes, the OCCS is informed in advance of such a project, and a copy of the report outlining the results is sent to the OCCS.
5. The database with the EDI data should also include: child’s date of birth, gender, and postal code, unique school and teacher identification numbers, and time of class. The database does not include students’ names.
6. Individual students are not identified in any way.
7. A copy of any research paper or any other publication including data collected with the EDI will be sent to OCCS.

Community-wide implementation additional guidelines:

8. If requesting implementation directed from OCCS, the intention is declared by contacting the School Readiness to Learn Project Team no later than September 30th of the school year in which it is going to take place.
9. If the reporting services are not requested from OCCS for population-wide data collection, any reports sent to schools and community must be accompanied by interpretation guidelines. A copy of the reports will be shared with OCCS.
10. Supporting materials (available from OCCS) will be used to inform teachers and community representatives. The updated version of the EDI Guide will be provided to teachers.
11. If it is used for the population-level reporting on children’s school readiness, the groups for which the EDI is implemented are self-contained logical groups for whom meaningful conclusions can be drawn, i.e. the populations are based on geographical (city, region) or administrative boundaries (school board, family of schools).
12. The smallest level of data aggregation is either school or census tract area, with an extreme caution applied in interpretation of data for groupings where 10 or less children contribute to the grouping.
13. If using the data for population-wide reporting, we recommend that percent of children deemed as “not ready to learn” is the percent of children who score in the lowest 10th percentile on one or more scales. The latest cohort distribution of scores in all sites in Canada can be obtained from OCCS.

Research project additional guidelines:

14. If the EDI is used for a research project, a list of all other measures used that may potentially be linked with the EDI will be provided.
15. Major analysis is always done using the five predefined domains. As of May 2003, subscales for our of the five domains have been identified, and are available for using in analyses. If any other subscales are reported, they have to be scientifically justified, and their internal reliability has to be examined.
16. If using the data for research purposes only, the time of implementation can be adjusted; however, the timing of data collection in relation to the school year has then to be very clearly stated in the brief research description sent to the OCCS.

If you plan to implement the EDI, please contact us.