The Human Early Learning Project (HELP) is hosting their annual Fall Expo on November 4, 2015. The full-day event will be held in downtown Vancouver at UBC Robson Square.
Although still in the planning stage, the event will feature several keynote presentations, hands-on workshops with researchers, and plenty of networking opportunities.
The EDI team participated in McMaster’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences 27th Annual Research Day, hosted for the first time at Mohawk College in order to accommodate the large number of participants. The theme of the day was “Mechanisms of Risk, Resilience, and Treatment Response” and was hosted by Dr. James MacKillop, Peter Boris Chair in Addictions Research.
The EDI was well represented at the event, with four posters submitted:
Offord, A., Duku, E., & Janus, M. Challenges to parenting kindergarten children: A population perspective.
Raos, R., & Janus, M. The impact of different geographic aggregations on the association between socioeconomic status and healthy child development.
Langevin, J., & Janus, M. Association between accessibility to early childhood intervention (ECI) and children’s skills at the kindergarten level.
Wang, A. N., & Janus, M. The impact of community-based music programs on preschool aged children.
PDF copies of the posters are available upon request.
Jane Margaret McCormack and Sarah Elizabeth Verdon have published a paper mapping AEDC vulnerability against the location of paediatric speech-language pathologists (SLP) across Australia. The study, published in the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, found many children vulnerable in the Language and Cognitive Development and Communication Skills and General Knowledge domains did not have access to a SLP. The study raises important questions about how best to deliver needed services.
Informa Healthcare has the abstract available to view online.
Lynn E. Cohen and Dana E. Friedman have published a book chapter titled The Early Development Instrument: A Bioecological View of School Readiness. The chapter appears in the Rethinking Readiness in Early Childhood Education: Implications for Policy and Practice. The chapter presents EDI data from two areas in New York state—Long Island and Westbury— to highlight how the instrument can lead to connections and reciprocity across the various systems of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model.
The City of Pasadena has released its Early Child Development Policy which includes EDI data mapped in relationship to the neighbourhood conditions in which children live. The report outlines a vision and plan for Pasadena to bring direction and a comprehensive approach to the city’s early childhood policy and services. City council has adopted the report, which shows how at a municipal level the EDI can be used to drive new city-level policies, investment, and infrastructure.
The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving has released the results of a pilot EDI implementation in Hartford and West Hartford, Connecticut. The pilot is the first ever implementation of the EDI in Connecticut and was guided by the UCLA Center for Healthier Families, Children and Communities.
You can download the report of the EDI in Hartford and West Hartford here. The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving has also created interactive maps to accompany the reports and provide contextual data.
In the last week of February the EDI team hosted an International EDI Data Workshop for Rosina Vanessa Sánchez Jiménez and Luis Eduardo Ferrer Cruz, two researchers from the Ministerio de Educación del Perú.
The pair of researchers travelled to Hamilton, Ontario to meet with members of the McMaster faculty and the EDI statistical team to familiarize themselves with the EDI data, learn appropriate analytic methods, and engage in hands-on sessions for creating detailed reports. The workshop was quite timely as Perú conducted the National Assessment of Early Education in 2014, a baseline measure of early child development that utilized the EDI to collect data on over 16,000 children.
Combined EDI and KPS data from Brant county in Ontario suggests that parental care during the first year of life is associated with better child development on some, but not all, developmental domains among kindergarten children. The study, authored by Anca Gaston, Sarah A. Edwards, and Jo Ann Tober was published in the International Journal of Child, Youth, & Family Studies.
The 2015 Australian Early Development Census National Conference was held in Glenelg, South Australia from February 18-20. The conference was hosted by the Telethon Kids Institute and held at the Stamford Grand Hotel.
The conference shared data collected from national AEDC implementations in Australia as well as EDI collections from around the world. The conference was divided into four areas: Community, Schools, Government/Policy, and Research. The conference featured many distinguished keynote speakers, including John Frank (The University of Edinburgh), Catherine Law (University College London), John Lynch (University of Adelaide), Magdalena Janus (McMaster University), Sally Brinkman (Telethon Kids Institute), Sharon Goldfeld (Royal Children’s Hospital), and Anne Hollonds (Policy and Strategy Consultant). Slides from the keynote presentations as well as other conference presentations can be viewed online.