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The primary purpose of this toolkit is to provide a resource for researchers from various disciplines interested in planning and evaluating programs or interventions aimed at improving the health and development of infants and young children. The toolkit aims to: provide an overview of issues affecting early development and its measurement; discuss the types of tests typically used with children under five years; provide guidelines for selecting and adapting tests for use in developing countries, and make recommendations for planning successful assessment strategies. The toolkit focuses on children who have not yet entered school, and are thus under six years old. The primary reason we are focusing on this age group is that during the first five years of life, children's language, early understanding of mathematics and reading, and self-control emerge. The extent to which children master these skills during this critical period has implications for success in school (Lerner, 1998), and thus we wanted to focus on children in this pre-school period. The toolkit is essential at this time for the following reasons: children in developing countries are growing up at a disadvantage; assessments of children must expand to include a wider range of outcomes; and no such toolkit exists as present.
Adaptation --- Cognitive Development --- Communication Skills --- Curriculum --- Early Childhood --- Early Childhood Development --- Early Childhood Education --- Education --- Gender --- Health Monitoring & Evaluation --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Infancy --- Kindergarten --- Literacy --- Mental Health --- Nutrition --- Primary Education --- Quality Control --- Reading --- Schools --- Social Skills --- Speech --- Teachers --- Violence --- Wages --- Workers
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Longitudinal patterns of child development and socioeconomic status are described for a cohort of children in Madagascar who were surveyed when they were 3-6 and 7-10 years old. Substantial wealth gradients were found across multiple domains: receptive vocabulary, cognition, sustained attention, and working memory. The results are robust to the inclusion of lagged outcomes, maternal endowments, measures of child health, and home stimulation. Wealth gradients are significant at ages 3-4, widen with age, and flatten out by ages 9-10. For vocabulary and sustained attention, the gradient grows steadily between ages three and six; for cognitive composite and memory of phrases, the gradient widens later (ages 7-8) before flattening out. These gaps in cognitive outcomes translate into equally sizeable gaps in learning outcomes. Between 12 and 18 percent of the predicted gap in early outcomes is accounted for by differences in home stimulation, even after controlling for maternal education and endowments.
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In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a nation's official language, may not fully reflect a child's development, underscoring the importance of test translation and adaptation. To examine differences in vocabulary development by language of assessment, this study adapted and validated instruments to measure developmental outcomes, including expressive and receptive vocabulary. This study assessed 505 children ages 2 to 6 in rural communities in Western Kenya with comparable vocabulary tests in three languages: Luo (the local language or mother tongue), Swahili, and English (official languages) at two time points, five to six weeks apart, between September 2015 and October 2016. Younger children responded to the expressive vocabulary measure exclusively in Luo much more frequently than did older children: 44-59 percent of those ages 2 to 4, compared to 20-21 percent of those ages 5 to 6. Baseline receptive vocabulary scores in Luo and Swahili were strongly associated with receptive vocabulary in English at follow-up, even after controlling for English vocabulary at baseline: a multivariate regression of follow-up English vocabulary on standardized measures of receptive vocabulary in all three languages yields an estimate, for Luo, of ? = 0.26, SE = 0.05, p < 0.001; and for Swahili, ? = 0.10, SE = 0.05, p = 0.032. The study also found that parental Luo literacy at baseline was associated with child English vocabulary at follow-up, while parental English literacy at baseline was not: a multivariate regression on both measures, along with household controls, yielded, for Luo, ? = 0.11, SE = 0.05, p = 0.045; the coefficient on English was not statistically significantly distinguishable from zero (p = 0.18). The findings suggest that multilingual testing is essential to understanding the developmental environment and cognitive growth of multilingual children.
BPVS --- British Picture Vocabulary Scale --- Early Child Development --- Early Childhood Development --- Education --- Education For All --- Instruction Language --- Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool --- MDAT --- Multilingual Environment --- PPVT --- School Readiness --- Vocabulary Test
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This paper evaluates a government program in Malawi, which aimed to improve quality at community-based childcare centers and complemented these efforts with a group-based parenting support program. Children in the integrated intervention arm (teacher training and parenting) had significantly higher scores in measures of language and socio-emotional development than children in centers receiving teacher training alone at the 18-month follow-up. However, the study finds no effects on child assessments at the 36-month follow-up. Significant improvements at the centers relating to classroom organization and teacher behavior in the teacher-training only arm did not translate into improvements in child outcomes at either follow-up. The findings suggest that, in resource-poor settings with informal preschools, programs that integrate parenting support within preschools may be more effective than programs that simply improve classroom quality.
Early Childhood Development --- Education --- Parenting Education --- Preschool Teacher Training
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Worldwide, 250 million children under five (43 percent) are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support programs have shown significant benefits for children's development, but the programs are often expensive and resource intensive. The objective of this study was to test several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents and improve emergent literacy skills in children. The intervention was a modified dialogic reading training program that used culturally and linguistically appropriate books adapted for a low-literacy population. The study used a cluster randomized controlled trial with four intervention arms and one control arm in a sample of caregivers (n
Adaptation to Climate Change --- Dialogic Reading --- Early Childhood --- Education --- Educational Institutions and Facilities --- Educational Sciences --- Effective Schools and Teachers --- Environment --- Inequality --- Local-Language Storybooks --- Poverty Reduction --- Primary School Readiness --- Word Gap
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Parents play a crucial role in the promotion of early childhood development, and understanding parental perceptions of early childhood development may help enhance parental investments early in life. To explore this question, caregivers were asked to rank their child's intelligence in comparison with other children in the community, and the rankings were compared with children's scores on an assessment of developmental abilities across multiple domains. Using cross-sectional data on children ages 16-42 months in rural Madagascar, this paper documents the discordance between caregivers' perceived early childhood development with an interviewer-based measure of early childhood development. The paper examines the determinants of caregivers' under- and over-estimation of child development using multinomial logistic regressions. The study finds that caregiver perceptions of early childhood development in Madagascar do not align consistently with an interviewer-based measure. Approximately 8 percent of the caregivers under-estimated and almost 50 percent over-estimated their children's abilities. Better child nutritional status, caregivers with a greater belief in their influence on child intelligence, and higher socioeconomic status were associated with lower odds of under- or over-estimation of early childhood development. Further research is needed to understand the common cues that caregivers use to identify child development milestones, to inform the design of parenting interventions.
Caregiver Perceptions --- Early Child Development --- Early Childhood Development --- Education
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