A holistic approach to child development: factors influencing overall development in children in care in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Child development is complex and definitions and categorizations are not universal. This can make a cohesive approach difficult for the many parties who have a responsibility to support and encourage development in young children in out-of-home care. In order to align policy priorities and simplify decision-making, it is perhaps more appropriate to take a holistic approach to child development, to recognize the interconnectedness of domains, and to promote development as inclusive and continuous. Objective: This presentation explores the developmental assessment of young children living in out-of-home care using the Ages and Stages Questionnaires® Third Edition (ASQ-3™; Squires & Bricker, 2009). Since 2016, the ASQ-3 has been integrated into the Assessment and Action Record (AAR-C2-2016; Flynn, Miller, & Desjardins, 2016), the core instrument of the Ontario Looking After Children (OnLAC) needs assessment and outcome monitoring project. Phase I of this study sought to examine and explain the relationship between the five domains of development measured by the ASQ-3 (communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and personal-social). Phase II aimed to provide decision-makers, including practitioners, caregivers, and policy-makers, with evidence of demographic, risk, and protective factors affecting overall development for children in care. Method: Phase I. We performed an exploratory factor analysis using a cross-sectional sample of 1,459 children aged eight months to five years living in out-of-home care in Ontario, Canada, in an attempt to further simplify ASQ-3 data and discover any underlying factors affecting subscale scores. Phase II. We conducted a 3-step hierarchical regression using a subsample of 1,097 children aged one to five years to examine the effect of possible predictors on overall development. Results: The factor analysis indicated that there was a single underlying construct reflected in the five ASQ-3 domains, which justified the creation of a composite score of overall development (α = .85). Higher scores on the composite measure indicate a higher level of overall development. The follow-up regression model was significant and explained 34% of the variance in overall development. Increased literacy-promoting activities, the child’s positive view of his/her abilities, and kinship placement were significant protective factors, and gender (male), social-emotional difficulty, and a higher number of other children living in the placement were significant risk factors. The child’s age was not a statistically significant predictor of overall development. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that a simplified, holistic approach to child development is appropriate for use with young children in care. The domains of development measured by the ASQ-3 are tightly-tied; by promoting protective factors and addressing risk factors, decision-makers in a child’s life have the opportunity to positively shape his/her developmental outcome across all domains.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".