PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Brief outline

In view of recent interest in scientific and educational circles, as well as among the general public, in the issue of children’s readiness to learn at the time of school entry, we developed a short, teacher-completed instrument. Called the Early Development Instrument, or the EDI, it measures children’s readiness to learn at school in five general domains identified in the literature: physical health and well-being; social knowledge and competence; emotional health/maturity; language and cognitive development; and general knowledge and communication skills. The process of developing the items involved consultations with educators, in particular kindergarten teachers in the Toronto District School Board, in collaboration with the Early Years Action Group and the Parenting and Literacy Centres. Preliminary versions of the instrument were tested for validation purposes at several sites in Ontario. In the school year 1998-1999, the instrument was tested for its cultural validity and finally implemented in all kindergarten classes in the Metro Toronto and North York sections of the Toronto District School Board, as well as in several other communities across the country.

The instrument is completed by the kindergarten teachers in the second half of a school year. The disadvantages of having just one informant (the teacher) is far outweighed by the advantage of having a measure which is feasible, acceptable, and reasonably-priced, and thus can be administered to populations of children. This would be an impossible task if information from parents was also requested.

Objectives

The main objective of this project was to develop and field-test a feasible, acceptable, and psychometrically sound measuring instrument which assesses readiness to learn in the school environment of children at the junior and senior kindergarten level, that is, just before entering grade 1. The kindergarten level of testing was chosen as the first organized educational step accessible to all children. The instrument has been designed to provide information for groups of children in order to: 1) report on populations of children in different communities, 2) assess the strengths and deficits in students, and 3) predict how children will do in elementary school.

The instrument

The final version of the instrument is based on the data from over 16,000 students, collected in the Spring of 1999. The instrument’s full name is: Early Development Instrument: A Population-based Measure for Communities (EDI). This name reflects the fact that our measure assesses the outcome of the early years. At the same time, however, it provides information on children’s readiness to learn at school, which 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: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication skills and general knowledge, and two indicators of special skills and special problems. The testing to date demonstrated that the EDI has very good internal and test-retest reliability, and external validity.

Teachers who have completed the EDI report that the time of completion of the instrument is about 20 minutes. The majority also thought that the our instrument was helpful in thinking about students, as well as clear to work with.

Timing

The EDI data is collected in the second half of the kindergarten year. This timing is dictated by several reasons. First, by that time, the teachers will have grown to know their students very well and can easily and efficiently complete the instrument. Second, a lot of children who may have been showing some weaknesses at the beginning of the school year due to lack of exposure to school environment or the language of instruction, will be able to catch up with their peers within a few months, and therefore be ready for school. The EDI is intended to demonstrate as not ready only the group who is still showing weaknesses shortly before the start of grade school.

Reporting

The Offord Centre for Child Studies, at McMaster University is a national repository of the EDI. The majority of the Early Development Instrument data is processed at the Centre. Once data has been collected and analysed, each site receives a report consisting of four separate documents: 1) Demographic frequency tables and simple comparisons for all students in the sites (e.g., girls vs. boys); 2) Descriptive report which puts the site results in perspective; 3) Behavioural profiles of children with the highest and lowest scores for each scale; these profiles are adjusted for actual frequencies of behaviours shown at each site; 4) 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.

Progress

In the early part of the 1999/2000 school year, the Early Development Instrument was finalised. A short “Factsheet” containing description of the finalised scales is available. We also produced a manual for completion of the EDI, called the EDI Guide. This Guide contains clarifications of most questions on the EDI and is meant to facilitate uniform interpretation of these questions. The EDI Guide clarifies the interpretation of many items, and thus shortens the time required to complete the instrument. Both the instrument and the Guide are available in English and French.

We have continued our partnership with Human Resources Development Canada, which started in 1999 in the North York community. As a part of this partnership within the federally-funded Understanding the Early Years Initiative (UEY), in the early months of 2000 the EDI was implemented in five communities across the country (each in a different province), followed by the National Longitudinal Survey on Children and Youth (NLSCY) on a representative sample of these 5-year-olds, and a community mapping study. The NLSCY component provides us with more detailed information on children’s early development. The community mapping study is a survey of a host of demographic and service-related data about each neighbourhood in a community. These, together with the EDI results, give full and rich information about the state of the community with respect to fostering healthy child development as well as the possible variables that contribute to it.

The same exercise was repeated in the early months of 2001, when seven new UEY communities were involved in the EDI implementation. For more information on the UEY check the website: http://www11.sdc.gc.ca/en/cs/sp/index.shtml.

In addition to the UEY sites, we continued the implementation of the EDI in other sites. We also established a partnership with another set of five communities in Ontario. These communities received their funding from the Children’s Secretariat in Ontario in order to collect information on young children. Between 700 and 1,500 children were involved in each, thus adding about 6,000 children to the sample. In one of these communities we have also been collaborating with the local school board in evaluating an early identification screening. In addition, several communities approached us directly for implementation and interpretation of the EDI. The total number of communities that participated in the 1999/2000 school year is 18, with a total number of students about 45,000.

In 2000/2001, the EDI was implemented in 12 UEY sites across Canada (7 new sites and 5 repeated sites), as well as an additional four sites in Ontario, increasing the database to a total of 90,000 children. In 2001/2002 the EDI was implemented in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in 46 sites, four of which were research projects, bringing the total number of children in the EDI database at the end of the 2001/02 to over 150,000.

In the 2002/03 school year the EDI was implemented in kindergarten classes across Canada in about 50 sites (approximately 92,000 students), and at the completion of the 2003/04 school year, the total number of children in the EDI database was increased to approximately 293,000.

Contact information

There are several other documents describing details of the EDI implementation, i.e., the cost, guidelines, and database. If you require more information, or are considering using the EDI in your community, please contact us at least by June of the year preceding the implementation school year. The EDI is available as a research tool, as well as a population-level monitoring tool. The specific guidelines for use of the EDI are available on request.