Population health begins in early childhood: Kindergarten EDI school readiness scores as a predictor of sixth-grade academic outcomes in the USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
School readiness skills in early childhood are strongly linked to later academic performance, health, and overall quality of life. Various tools, including the Early Development Instrument (EDI), have been used to assess children’s school readiness skills. The EDI is an internationally utilized, holistic measure used to monitor population trends in developmental health and school readiness in early childhood. Although EDI scores demonstrated associations with later academic achievement in several countries, only one study in the United States has examined the EDI’s predictive validity for third-grade outcomes. To expand this knowledge, the current study investigated the psychometric properties of the EDI in the United States, focusing on sixth-grade outcomes. Using a sample of kindergarteners ( N = 2610) from five school districts in Orange County, California, this study examined whether kindergarten EDI scores predict academic proficiency in mathematics and English language arts by sixth grade. Findings show that kindergarten EDI scores are strong predictors of sixth-grade academic performance. Children classified as vulnerable or at risk in one or more EDI domains showed significantly lower proficiency in both mathematics and English language arts compared to their peers who were on track. Additionally, disparities in academic outcomes were observed across factors such as sex at birth, ethnoracial background, individualized education plan status, and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch. Implications for early childhood population health are discussed.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".