Predictive Validity of the Infant Toddler Checklist in Primary Care at the 18-month Visit and School Readiness at 4 to 6 Years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends developmental surveillance and screening in early childhood in primary care. The 18-month visit may be an ideal time for identification of children with delays in language and communication, or symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Little is known about the predictive validity of developmental screening tools administered at 18 months. Our objective was to examine the predictive validity of the Infant Toddler Checklist (ITC) at the 18-month health supervision visit, using school readiness at kindergarten age as the criterion measure. Methods: We designed a prospective cohort study, recruiting in primary care in Toronto, Canada. Parents completed the ITC at the 18-month visit. Teachers completed the Early Development Instrument (EDI) when the children were in Kindergarten, age 4-6 years.We calculated screening test properties with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). We used multivariable logistic and linear regression analyses adjusted for important covariates. Results: Of 293 children (mean age 18 months), 30 (10.2%) had a positive ITC including: concern for speech delay (n=11, 3.8%), concern for other communication delay (n=13, 4.4%), and concern for both (n=6, 2.0%). At follow-up (mean age 5 years), 54 (18.4%) had overall EDI vulnerability, 19 (6.5%) had vulnerability on the 2 EDI communication domains. The ITC sensitivity ranged from 11%-32%, specificity from 91%-96%, false positive rates from 4%-9%, PPV from 16%-35%, NPV from 83%-95%. A positive ITC screen and ITC concern for speech delay were associated with lower scores in EDI communication skills and general knowledge (β= −1.08; 95% CI: −2.10, −0.17; β= −2.35; 95% CI: −3.63, −1.32) and EDI language and cognitive development (β= −0.62; 95% CI: −1.25, −0.18; β= −1.22; 95% CI: −2.11, −0.58). Conclusions: The ITC demonstrated high specificity suggesting that most children with a negative ITC screen will demonstrate school readiness at 4-6 years, and low false positive rates, minimizing over-diagnosis. The ITC had low sensitivity highlighting the importance of ongoing developmental surveillance and screening.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".