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. 2023 Dec 12;42(1):140.
doi: 10.1186/s41043-023-00483-2.

Establishing performance standards for child development: learnings from the ECDI2030

Nicole Petrowski  1 , Filipa de Castro  2 , Susan Davis-Becker  3 , Melissa Gladstone  4 , Claudia Regina Lindgren Alves  5 , Yvonne Becher  6 , Jennifer Grisham  7 , Kirsten Donald  8 , Meta van den Heuvel  9 , Gwendoline Kandawasvika  10 , Shazia Maqbool  11 , Fahmida Tofail  12 , Tao Xin  13 , Pia Zeinoun  14 , Claudia Cappa  15
Affiliations

Establishing performance standards for child development: learnings from the ECDI2030

Nicole Petrowski et al. J Health Popul Nutr. .

Abstract

Background: Standards of early childhood development (ECD) are needed to determine whether children living in different contexts are developmentally on track. The Early Childhood Development Index 2030 (ECDI2030) is a population-level measure intended to be used in household surveys to collect globally comparable data on one of the indicators chosen to monitor progress toward target 4.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals: The proportion of children aged 24-59 months who are developmentally on track in health, learning and psychosocial well-being.

Methods: To define performance cut-scores for the ECDI2030 we followed a criterion-referenced standard setting exercise using the modified Angoff method. The exercise gauged the expectations from 15 global experts in ECD and was informed by representative population data collected in Mexico and the State of Palestine. The final calibrated age-specific performance cut-scores were applied to these data to estimate the proportion of children developmentally on track, disaggregated by background characteristics, including the child's sex and attendance to early childhood education.

Results: Through a process of standard setting, we generated robust performance standards for the ECDI2030 by establishing five age-specific cut-scores to identify children as developmentally on track.

Conclusions: This paper demonstrated how the standard setting methodology, typically applied to measures in the health and education fields, could be applied to a measure of child development. By creating robust criterion-referenced standards, we have been able to ensure that the cut-scores related to age for the ECDI2030 are based on performance standards set by global experts in the ECD field for defining on and off track development.

Keywords: Child development; Measurement; Performance standards; SDGs.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Example ECDI2030 items
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Subject Matter experts’ recommended cut-scores by age and round
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Proportion of children developmentally on track according to cut-scores for Round 1 and Round 2 in Mexico and State of Palestine, by age
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
ECDI2030 score distribution and age-specific cut-scores, Mexico
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
ECDI2030 score distribution and age-specific cut-scores, State of Palestine
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

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