Early intervention (EI) therapy services aim to address family-centered goals to facilitate young children’s development and participation in meaningful life activities. Current methods to evaluate children in EI assess discrete developmental skills but provide little information on the child’s ability to successfully incorporate that skill in everyday life. Furthermore, traditional measures have limited opportunity for parent report, despite parent engagement being a critical component for successful implementation of EI services. A measure that involves parents in the therapeutic process to track family-driven EI goals related to a child’s occupational engagement in meaningful family activities and routines is desperately needed. Using a qualitative design and conventional content analysis, we identified 41 distinct activities of infant–toddlers from a cohort of 23 caregivers. Activity items were matched with photographs and validated with experts in pediatric rehabilitation using the Delphi method. The resulting 40 activity/photograph pairs were used to develop a new measure of pediatric occupational engagement, the Infant Toddler Activity Card Sort (ITACS).
Date Presented 04/06/19
While many pediatric assessments are based on developmental milestones, achievement of discrete skills may not truly capture their use in functional contexts. Difficulties in transferring skills to everyday life may manifest in specific activity deficits, creating a need for direct measures of participation. The Infant Toddler Activity Card Sort (ITACS) was created to fill this gap by summarizing occupational development in early childhood. Here, we describe the ITACS test-retest reliability.
Primary Author and Speaker: Ashley Chuck
Additional Authors and Speakers: Laura Pilney
Contributing Authors: Catherine Hoyt, Taniya Varughese, Evelyn Shen, Allison King, Regina Abel, Hannah Manis, Kelly Baker, Emma Grandgeorge, Jianna Fernandez
Date Presented 04/04/19
Early intervention therapists rely on developmental milestone-focused assessments to identify deficits and justify services. However, these measures fail to assess a child’s ability to incorporate discrete skills into functional activities. The Infant Toddler Activity Card Sort (ITACS) will meet this need.
Primary Author and Speaker: Catherine Hoyt
Contributing Authors: Jianna Fernandez, Ashley Chuck, Laura Pilney, Taniya Varughese, Regina Abel, Allison King
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.