Demonstration of efficient assessment of developmental status with the D-score

Demonstration of efficient assessment of developmental status with the D-score

Eekhout, I.
van Buuren, S.
Verkerk, P.

2022

There are many milestones available to measure child development in the first years of life. For less experienced professionals it is difficult to select the most relevant milestones to assess the developmental status of a child. Moreover, using the milestones separately makes is difficult to get a global impression of the developmental status. The D-score can assist professionals in obtaining a global sense of early child development, because milestones are unified into one scale. The D-score is created by using the Rasch model, which has many advantageous properties, one of which is to enable more efficient administration by means of adaptive testing. An adaptive test does not use a fixed set of questions, but instead tailors the questions to the child. Therefore, adaptive testing can substantially reduce test length, and thus administrative burden while maintaining almost equivalent precision as compared to a traditional sequence-based administration of the test. Adaptive tests are widely used in education and tailor the next question to the individual child based on the responses to the previous questions. The adaptive test selects a first item (i.e., starting item) based on the age of the child. After recording the response to that item, the underlying algorithm calculates the D-score for the child and determines whether the result is precise enough to meet the stopping criterion. If the stopping criterion is not met, the computer selects the next item, such that it provides maximal information given all previous responses of the child, and the cycle continues. Adaptive testing is an efficient measurement technique that can improve the practical measurement of early child development. The D-score can support professionals in selecting milestones for children at any age and can quickly provide a global sense of the developmental status. In the presentation a demonstration will be given of an adaptive test to measure child development.

Health
D-score
Growth
Children
Child development
Screening
Assessment
Milestones

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:02b5709c-35fe-4cd6-85b8-c35d979c9b90

977141

Conventus Credo, Zagreb

21st EUSUHM (European Union for School and University Health and Medicine) Congress School and Adolescent Health Priorities - Rethinking, Redefining, Responding, 29th Sept-2nd Oct 2022, Split, Coratia, 30

public lecture