The late Dr. Clyde Hertzman, past director of the Human Early Learning Partnership at the University of British Columbia, and a leader of the pan-Canadian Early Child Development Monitoring Network, describes a proposed system for monitoring early childhood development & it’s determinants.
This system includes 5 elements:
- Population measures: measures that are taken of all children at a given point (such as at birth, 18 months or Kindergarten). An example includes the Early Development Instrument ‘EDI‘.
- Longitudinal Studies: random samples of children that begin at or before birth and intensively track influences and outcomes for individuals;
- Administrative Data Linkages: Bring together birth, health and education data (shared measurement~!)
- Social Indicators: ‘baskets’ of variables of social factors that effect children’s development, including socioeconomic and social capital factors
- Early Child Development program and policy databases that track all of the public investments that are made by a society into early childhood
