Assessing Early Childhood Development in East Asia and the Pacific: Item Equivalence across Countries

Abstract

In collaboration with UNICEF, governments in the East Asia Pacific Region have developed Early Learning and Development Standards (ELDS). A database which included 1738 indicators for 3-, 4-, and 5-year- olds from the ELDS of seven of these countries was created. Following welldefined criteria, 99 indicators were selected to form the following 7 domains: Cognitive Development (25); Cultural Knowledge and Participation (10); Language and Emergent Literacy (15); Motor Development (10); Health, Hygiene and Safety (10); Socio-Emotional Development (19); and Approaches to Learning (10). These selected indicators were converted into items with clear instructions and scoring schemes and which relied on observations. Hence indicators from countries in the region were used to develop the East Asia Pacific – Early Childhood Development Scales (EAP-ECDS). The EAP-ECDS was administered in the local language by well-trained assessors to 120 children in each of the following countries: China, Fiji and Mongolia. Stratification variables were age (3, 4, 5), gender (2), and location (urban/rural). Results indicated that (i) items within the same domain had satisfactory reliability with alpha above 0.8 for all sub-scales except for Approaches to Learning (α = 0.77); (ii) the EAP-ECDS is a developmental scale with older children scoring significantly higher than younger children in each domain, within each country. Item analysis and model fitting enabled identification of items with poor discriminating power and/or with too low or too high difficulty levels. Differential response functioning (DIF) analysis was used to identify potential item bias and the chi-square and generalized logistic regression methods were applied to examine DIF. Based on the results of the analyses, items have been amended or omitted and the EAP-ECDS now has 85 items and is being administered to nationally representative samples in 6 countries. This poster considers processes associated with achieving cultural appropriateness and item equivalence in cross-cultural measurement.