From Kindergarten readiness to fourth-grade assessment: longitudinal analysis with linked population data.
Early child development (ECD)--the development of physical, social-emotional, and language-cognitive capacities in the early years--is a foundation of health, well-being, learning, and behaviour across the life course. Consequently, the capacity to monitor ECD is an important facet of a modern society. This capacity is achieved by having in place an ongoing flow of high-quality information on the state of early child development, its determinants, and long-term developmental outcomes. Accordingly, there remains a considerable need for research that merges community-centred, longitudinal, and linked-data approaches to monitoring child development. The current paper addresses this need by introducing one method of summarising and quantifying the developmental trajectories of British Columbian children at the neighbourhood- or district-level: computing the Community Index of Child Development (CICD) for each geographic area. A simple index that describes change in children's developmental trajectories at the aggregate level, the CICD is computable because of our capacity to conduct individual-level linkage of two population data sets: the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a holistic measure of children's readiness for school which is administered at Kindergarten, and the British Columbia Ministry of Education's Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA), a Grade 4 measure of academic skills. In this paper, we demonstrate: (a) wide variation in the CICDs according to the children's district of residence in Kindergarten; (b) an association of the CICDs with an indicator of the socioeconomic character of the neighbourhoods; and (c) contrasting patterns of neighbourhood convergence and divergence in two different school districts--such that, in some areas, children from high vulnerability neighbourhoods tend to catch up between Kindergarten and Grade 4 whereas, in other areas, they tend to fall further behind.
Lloyd
Jennifer E V
JE
Human Early Learning Partnership, University of British Columbia, Suite 440, 2206 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z3. jennifer.lloyd@ubc.ca
Hertzman
Clyde
C
D001955:British Columbia; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology; D002657:Child Development / Q000145:classification*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D003142:Communication; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods*; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D002666:Psychology, Child / Q000145:classification*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods; D012111:Residence Characteristics / Q000145:classification*; D018570:Risk Assessment / Q000379:methods*; D012574:Schools; D012931:Social Environment; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D035862:Vulnerable Populations / Q000523:psychology*