To improve a child's social-emotional skills, FH encourages playdates, visits, and organizes children's clubs with interactive games, like this one being led by an FH Peru staff member.
By Jana Torrico
Communities cannot rise out of poverty if their children do not thrive. That’s why early learning education and development programs that set a strong foundation for a child’s capacity to learn throughout life — across cognitive, social-emotional and language domains — are critical to later success. But how do we determine which approaches lead to that “strong start” global development practitioners strive for?
Experts agree that interventions within the first five years are the most strategic, cost-effective, and influential ways to alter the course of a child’s academic career. School success — a reduction in grade repetition, increased academic gains, increased salaries upon graduation, and, ultimately, escaping from poverty — begins during the earliest formative years, before primary school. It’s why the UN has outlined in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.2, “by 2030, all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education.”
Many approaches are being tried around the globe, but the dearth of robust evidence from impact evaluations has been a challenge to achieving access, equity and quality in early childhood education (ECE). Across the 16 countries where my organization, Food for the Hungry (FH), plans or implements childhood development and education programs, we have had difficulty comparing disparate data from varying evaluations. What our sector needed was an effective global assessment tool that accurately measured, then aggregated and shared the data across multiple contexts.
In response, Save the Children developed IDELA, the International Development and Early Learning Assessment, an open-source tool that measures four key areas of early development: social-emotional skills, emergent numeracy, emergent literacy, and motor skills in children ages 3.5 to 6 years. With IDELA, every child is a “data point” and every partner who utilizes this tool is asked to share each data point as part of a worldwide, collaborative effort to aggregate what we’re learning about what’s working in early education. IDELA is now used in 70+ countries, and FH has launched it in 13 countries where we work, one of it’s biggest rollouts.
IDELA allows FH to share a common language and standardized definitions across different countries. When we refer to “emergent literacy”, for example, no matter where they live and what language they speak, our staff automatically think of skills like print awareness, expressive vocabulary, first sounds, and letter recognition. Implementing IDELA has made us better informed about our targeted early learning interventions. As a result, we are able to more effectively ameliorate, implement and advocate for better programs for the youngest among us.
We offer three brief case studies that highlight areas where IDELA has helped diverse local practitioners pivot and improve ECE:
Emergent Literacy
Overall low IDELA assessment scores told our local staff in Burundi that children here were not acquiring the skills needed for successful transition into first grade. Emergent literacy was the lowest-ranked domain, which spurred a two-fold approach to increase language development skills.
FH established common play areas in the community, where children can sing songs and use expressive vocabulary to communicate more with peers. At home, FH is training parents and caregivers through Care Groups to have more conversational interactions with their children, including using higher-level vocabulary in daily life. Households were also taught to involve young children in daily activities, like going to local shops and markets and learning to name items. We also encourage elevating expressive vocabulary with pictorial books that parents or older children can read together. When our Burundi staff ran into a challenge of finding stories and resources in local languages, they participated in a book translation challenge—which resulted in 158 different children’s books translated into the local language.
A world away from Burundi, children in the Dominican Republic (DR), also scored low in emergent literacy, especially expressive vocabulary. As a result, our local DR staff recommended building community libraries, and establishing “parent schools” in 52 neighborhoods where parents are taught early stimulation practices. By parents engaging children through books and storytelling, children learn to identify symbols and letters that will be the building blocks of their literacy development. We equipped parents with appropriate tools, even parents who are not literate.
In the Philippines, children dance along with their peers during an afterschool program. Through games and play materials, children can begin building social capital with their peers.
Social-Emotional Skills
In the DR, the IDELA assessment revealed a surprising trend. Social-emotional skills among children was the second-highest domain after motor skills, the opposite of trends we’ve seen elsewhere, where social-emotional skills usually score lowest. (Our hunch is that the social, Caribbean culture here inherently strengthens these skills within and between families.) In contrast to the DR, we learned small gains were being made in social-emotional development in Guatemala. A child’s social-emotional development is as important as their cognitive and physical development. But we are not born with social-emotional skills, such as empathy , awareness of our own feelings, and resolving conflict to build healthy relationships with others. It takes practice. IDELA data revealed to our Guatemalan staff that children don’t often play together. So, they began encouraging play and provided games and materials to help build early social capital. Our staff implemented early stimulation training modules into their Care Groups, and are also raising awareness about social-emotional learning with others who interact with young children, including healthcare facility workers and pre-school teachers.
Emergent Numeracy
When children in Bangladesh scored low across the four IDELA areas, FH’s Bangladesh staff took a closer look at the data and identified emergent numeracy as a particularly struggling domain, with 40 percent of children completing less than half the activities correctly on the IDELA assessment.
In response, our staff decided local preschool teachers needed improved training and classroom materials like number charts, posters of different geometric shapes, and basic arithmetic resources to improve number recognition. In addition, staff encouraged caregivers to involve children in daily activities like counting chickens and other livestock, and for caregivers to set aside time to interact with their children as they went about their daily chores.
Consistent assessment makes a qualitative difference
IDELA has become critical to informing the work of our early childhood development practitioners, filling in gaps that lead to more effective outcomes. We hope this innovative measurement tool will lead to even more holistic approaches that will someday encompass spiritual or invisible dimensions of overcoming poverty, such as the emergence of hope and care for others. When we better understand and meet the early needs of every child, encouraging them to flourish in every sphere, that “data point” and “outcome” will be a child with a more promising future.
One of the four key areas that IDELA measures is motor skills. In the Dominican Republic, children play with early childhood development toys like building blocks, which help with creative thinking, cognitive skills, and motor skills.
About the author:
Jana Torrico is the Senior Specialist of Global Education Programs for Food for the Hungry, an international relief and development organization graduating communities from extreme poverty in over 20 countries worldwide.