Validation of the Early Development Instrument for children with special health needs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: Population-level data on the development of children with special health needs attending primary school can assist special education, health and service delivery strategies. This study aims to determine whether results of the Early Development Instrument (EDI) can be interpreted and used with the same confidence for children with special health needs as for those who are typically developing. Psychometric properties of the EDI for kindergarteners with identified special health needs are examined. METHODS: Data for children with a special health need designation come from a database of all Canadian provincial implementations of the EDI between 2004 and 2014. Item and domain characteristics (distributions of scores and measures of internal consistency) of the EDI were examined. Construct validation was assessed by correlating EDI scores with gender and age. The fit of the original factor structure of the EDI was evaluated using confirmatory factor analysis. RESULTS: Data for 29 692 children (69.8% male) were analysed. The performance of items and domains was similar to that of typically developing children. As expected, boys scored lower on all EDI domains (Cohen's d: 0.03-0.46) and a general, but non-significant, positive trend was observed between age and EDI scores. The factor structure of the EDI in this population yielded similar goodness-of-fit statistics as those reported in studies with typically developing children. CONCLUSION: Results of this investigation support the validity of the EDI in children with special health needs, paving the way for a more extensive use of EDI data for this vulnerable, yet often neglected, population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".