The Early Development Instrument - The Village that Raises a Child
A University-Based Child and Family Policy (CFP) Consortium webinar held in collaboration with SRCD.
The University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium, in collaboration with the Society for Research in Child Development, hosted a webinar on September 20, 2017 on the Early Development Instrument (EDI).
The Early Development Instrument (EDI) pilot project is a community needs assessment that provides precise data in the form of maps and tables to community collaborations in Illinois organized around young children’s well-being. These collaborations use data obtained with the EDI to inform existing and new strategic initiatives, including addressing local, state, and federal policy issues that affect these local efforts. The project provides technical assistance to community groups on issues like data literacy, community engagement, and strategic action planning.
The EDI is a teacher-completed, neighborhood based measure of "school readiness" used to learn about how kindergartners in a community are developing within their neighborhood contexts. While it focuses on commonly accepted domains of child development: 1) social competence; 2) emotional maturity; 3) physical well-being; 4) language and cognitive skills; and 5) communication skills and general knowledge, it was specifically designed and validated to consider children's development and school readiness at a community level.
The perspectives on children's well-being that the EDI offers, particularly through a repeated cross-sectional design, is a way to expand the focus from what early childhood programs and schools are or are not doing to include the analyses of how communities are organized, and resources allocated, to support children and their families. The data obtained from this tool, coupled with community members’ engagement, is a missing piece in efforts to promote data-informed policy making.
This webinar featured presentations by Jaclyn Vasquez, Mark Nagasawa, and Cristina Pacione-Zayas of the Erikson Institute. Please visit https://www.erikson.edu/research/edi-2/ for more information about the EDI pilot project.
