Development and psychometric properties of the Early Development Instrument (EDI): A measure of children's school readiness.

Abstract

The Early Development Instrument (EDI), a teacher-completed measure of children's school readiness at entry to Grade 1, was designed to provide communities with an informative, inexpensive and psychometrically sound tool to assess outcomes of early development as reflected in children's school readiness. Its psychometric properties at individual level were evaluated in two studies. Five a priori domains -physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and communication, and cognitive development and general knowledge -were tested in a factor analysis of data on over 16,000 kindergarten children. The factor analyses upheld the first three domains, but revealed the need to develop two new ones, resulting in the final version of the EDI consisting of: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, communication skills and general knowledge domains. These final domains showed good reliability levels, comparable with other instruments. A separate study (N = 82) demonstrated consistent agreements in parent-teacher, interrater reliabilities, concurrent validity, and convergent validity. These results establish the EDI as a psychometrically adequate indicator of child well-being at school entry.

Comorbid Development of Disruptive Behaviors from age 1½ to 5 Years in a Population Birth-Cohort and Association with School Adjustment in First Grade

“…Teacher ratings of children's DB and school adjustment were based on the Self-Administered Questionnaire for Teacher (SAQT; Lemelin & Boivin, 2007), completed at the end of first grade. The SAQT is a 163-item questionnaire based on the Early Development Instrument (EDI; Janus and Offord, 2007), which assesses teachers' perceptions of children's school readiness at the end of kindergarten. The SAQT was adapted to correspond to the level of development of first graders, by removing inappropriate items (e.g., referring to language and cognitive skills typically preceding school entry) and by adding others (e.g., referring to advanced skills and to academic performance) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth (NLSCY;Statistics Canada, 1995).…”

Determinants of child outcomes in a cohort of children in the Free Pre-School Year in Ireland, 2012/2013

“…A growing number of studies have established that the EDI has good internal and test-retest reliability as well as external validity (Forget-Dubois et al 2007;Janus and Offord 2007;Forer and Zumbo 2011;Guhn and Goelman 2011;Hymel, Le Mare, and McKee 2011;Janus, Brinkman, and Duku 2011). Early studies of the instrument indicated that: 'The EDI's psychometric properties have proven to be acceptable' (Janus and Offord 2007, 18;).…”

Health Disparities: A Life Course Health Development Perspective and Future Research Directions

“…Recently, many place-based efforts have taken a life course approach in attempt to improve cradle-to-career trajectories with attention paid to what works in different kinds of communities and microenvironments. Community-based researchers in Canada have used a new set of measures including the Early Development Instrument (administered from ages 4-6 years) and the Middle Development Instrument (administered at ages 9-11 years) to collect developmentally and dimensionally consistent measures of health development (Janus and Offord 2007;Schonert-Reichl et al 2013). This life course-oriented population data collection can be used to map and track health and well-being at different developmental stages, and to engage community members in identifying early development outcomes and how they relate with local community services and risk and protective factors, and in turn developing action strategies for systems-and community-level improvements.…”