Paths to equitable monitoring of early learning with SDG 4

The anthropological theory of culture (Goodenough, 1994), applied to children’s cognitive and social learning (Cole and Cagigas, 2010; Goodnow, 1990, 2010), posits that learning is both a cognitive and a social process, leading to the creation of the knowledge that a child needs to successfully participate in its society. While the cognitive

processes of learning may be universal, their results are interpreted and transformed through cultural practices, customary behaviours and ways of life. Applying this perspective to a global level of measuring of learning is challenging, yet crucial to achieve comparability and equitable progress.

Despite marked global progress in the enrolment of children in primary education over the last decade, many children still do not have access to education.

This is especially the case for the youngest ones, those in the poorest households and in conflict areas. Spurred by this evidence, the efforts of the international community on early learning focused on improving the specificity of early education targets in the new SDGs. Target 4.2 aims to: “By 2030, ensure that all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and pre-primary education so that they are ready for pre-primary education”. This Target is accompanied by a set of indicators meant to inform the monitoring frameworks in tracking progress towards the achievement of the SDGs by 2030.

As previously explained, Indicator 4.2.1 is “the proportion of children under 5 years of age who are developmentally on track in health, learning and psychosocial wellbeing, by sex”. It is the expectation of UN Member States that the global expertise in early education will contribute to the development of equitable measures of these indicators.

59 Written by Magdalena Janus, Offord Centre for Child Studies, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University.

Figure 1.1 Interim reporting of SDG 4 indicators

Reliable and equitable accountability mechanisms are needed to measure the progress towards, and eventual achievement of, the targets. Since their endorsement, the field of early education has repeatedly declared its commitment to contribute to the effort of keeping the SDGs on track (Raikes et al., 2017). Emerging voices are calling for scientific rigour and breadth in the measurement of the SDGs. Issues with external and internal validity, the incorporation of longitudinal studies and most of all a reliance on developmental science are among the factors being considered (Verma and Petersen, 2018). Inclusion of the goal focusing on early childhood education in the SDGs is an acknowledgment of the importance of early development and its contribution to, not only individual healthy trajectories, but the health of nations and prosperity of the world as well.

4.3.1 Opportunities and challenges

Focus on early development, embedded as it is in the context of other priorities, offers both opportunities and challenges. The target and indicator descriptors are, by the nature of the complex document they are part of, static, addressing a status that can be described by a number. It is up to the measurement, education and developmental science community to add dynamic character and depth to those indicators, by learning to use data to optimise trajectories of learning and developing innovative strategies to address the data gap in very early development.

One of the first opportunities offered by Target 4.2 is the motivation for broadening the scope of developmental and educational sciences beyond what has traditionally been used as gold standards.

Target 4.2 and its indicators make it imperative to provide reliable tools and methodologies to learn about ECD, universalities and idiosyncrasies, taking into account cross-national, ethnic, geographic and (dis)ability boundaries while developing best practices, optimal outcomes and customised approaches.

While some of these opportunities involve the creation of new tools (McCoy et.al., 2016), or overhauling

existing ones like UNICEF’s ECDI,⁶⁰ these initiatives should go hand in hand with: i) an innovative use of existing, historical data; ii) the creation of platforms for data-sharing and storage; iii) the development of techniques for data harmonisation; and iv) an expansion, rather than replacement, of support for locally-relevant data collection in order to broaden the scope and increase the contextual understanding of whether progress has been achieved. While the formulation of Target 4.2 is very specific and there should be one common way of addressing its measurement globally in the short term, its interpretation cannot, ultimately, be confined to one single number devoid of depth or context.

If the opportunities are beguiling, the challenges are equally daunting. Three in particular stand out and must be accounted for in the measurement framework.

First, while expedient and necessary in the short term, adopting one measurement as the only means to monitor learning and development is neither realistic nor necessary for making progress, or appropriate for understanding the course of change.

Second, the inherent sources of error in measurement are many. One of the most important and most obvious is the mode of administration of the assessment, which has to be adequate for the

developmental age and appropriate for the assessment goal. It has to be acknowledged and agreed that no administration mode (direct observation, interview with a caregiver or teacher report) is either fully objective or fully comprehensive (in the sense of including multiple domains in depth), and therefore, an effort must be made to include different administration modes and informants. The collection of data and measurement practices have to be accompanied by resources for data analysis and refinement, with ongoing checks for estimating reliability.

60 See Chapter xxx “Monitoring early childhood development outcomes in the SDGs” for a discussion on UNICEF’s ECDI tool.

Finally, the aspiration for breadth and depth in measurement notwithstanding, it will be a difficult task to ensure that most or all countries report on one – let alone more than one – type of measurement.

It is often said that one cannot reliably measure early development. If measured using an interview with a caregiver, the respondent might have difficulty answering questions. If measured through a direct assessment, the reliability and training of assessors may be limiting. If exclusively measured by a physical health indicator, such as stunting, the output becomes a dichotomous indicator of development delay rather than the broad probability of being on track for optimal trajectory of development (Black et al., 2016). Despite a high level of reliability evidenced by existing data, the major limitation of school-based teacher reports is the age of the students, as teachers can only serve as informants for children who attend centre-based learning (Janus and Reid-Westoby, 2016).

Despite these concerns, a recent analysis of data for children under 3 years old from a variety of countries, collected with various instruments (some locally-developed), demonstrated a remarkable stability in arriving at a comparable, normative curve of the child development trajectory, regardless of the country or tool the data came from (Lancaster et al., 2018).

4.3.2 A potential way forward

Bearing in mind these opportunities and challenges, what are the consequences for building a

measurement framework that could be used to report on early childhood for the SDGs?

It is undisputable that the vision for the new set of measures has to be broad. One effort – the revised ECDI – is aiming for a short, globally-comparable metric that could be easily interpreted. That effort needs to be strongly supported and endorsed, but at the same time the uniform effort should not come at the cost of suppressing the diversity of measurement.

One potential solution is that, once established, the ECDI should become a component of as many local

learning/development measurement and evaluation initiatives as possible to ensure that Target 4.2 is monitored in a sensitive and feasible way.

Monitoring child development at the population level⁶¹ aims to address and counter bias in sample selection and has been implemented successfully in several countries, such as Australia, Brazil, Canada, Jordan and Kyrgyzstan using the Early Development Instrument (EDI) (Janus and Reid-Westoby, 2016).

Repeated implementations over time can assist with understanding the trends and account for changes from one time point to another at the regional level.

The advantage of the EDI is its comprehensive coverage of developmental domains, which requires considerable time for translation, adaptation and completion, especially at the population level.

Offering a smaller developmental coverage of over 50 countries are existing data for many low- and middle-income countries, collected through nationally-representative samples with UNICEF’s ECDI through MICS⁶², which broadly reflect the developmental status of young children. In between the two levels of coverage, there are many databases that provide information on the developmental status of young children and could be harnessed to inform the current level of child development, to report on “on track” or normative development as stated in Indicator 4.2.1, and provide a baseline for further monitoring of the progress towards achieving Target 4.2.

Global efforts to achieve uniformity have the advantage of optimising resources and using highly-skilled professionals to examine the conceptual and psychometric quality of assessments. They should draw on local and regional expertise. It is simultaneously imperative not to suppress the existing diversity of measurement. Monitoring progress towards the achievement of goals, such as the SDGs, has to come with the capacity of understanding the variations across groups of interests, such as

61 For example, including all or nearly all possible participants, similarly to a census approach.

62 MICS, housed and managed by UNICEF, is the largest source of statistically-sound and internationally-comparable data on women and children worldwide (http://mics.unicef.org).

Figure 1.1 Interim reporting of SDG 4 indicators

countries or regions. That understanding can only come with a broader perspective on several fronts:

coverage (which encompasses inclusion of children with disabilities), mode and ease of administration, cultural applicability and local relevance. It may also be the case that some countries simply prefer to report based on their own national efforts or a global one they have become accustomed to, for various reasons, even if these are, in the opinion of global psychometricians, less than perfect.

Moreover, the similarity of the performance of items and scales is an extremely useful feature, but it needs to be complemented with culturally-sensitive (rather than culturally-neutral) means of assessment, by collecting locally-relevant information that may be idiosyncratic for a country or a region. A body of work exists to demonstrate that different tests can be interpreted on comparable metrics (Kolen and Brennan, 2014), and more effort should be directed towards the extension of that methodology to existing (and new) learning measurement tools. The second implication for the measurement framework is the continuous monitoring of the comparability and reliability of collected data.

There are three activities that the international community should engage in to not only report on results of measurement but to interpret them as well.

They include:

i) Promoting a short, feasible and “universal”

assessment, its application with all children and its use in a longitudinal framework;

ii) Facilitating the continuous use of validated tools that address more comprehensive development, from a variety of perspectives, in a culturally- and disability-sensitive, rather than neutral, way; and iii) Enabling the collection of contextual,

socioeconomic, demographic, educational and health service data that could assist in interpreting Indicator 4.2.1.

This effort should also be supported by three methodological and training initiatives:

i) Investing in innovative, cost-effective, time-saving and customised modes of data collection (tablets, mobile phones, etc.);

ii) Promoting statistical expertise in the assessment of the quality and comparability of measurement, such as assessment of measurement invariance, and further developing methods for cross-comparability of data collected by different tools; and

iii) Promoting training and expertise in the adaptation and use of global tools, such as the understanding of and adherence to criteria for modifications at the local or national level.

Reliable and relevant data collected in a culturally- and developmentally-appropriate manner are key to fulfilling the promises of the SDGs. They are needed by practitioners and policymakers to make informed decisions, by evaluating existing and new initiatives in a bias-free way that is translatable into action (Raikes, Dua and Britto, 2015; McCoy et.al., 2016).

In addition, it is crucial that the results from data collection processes across countries and regions are comparable. The aim is not to create league tables but to highlight, understand and act on the progress (or lack of it) that may be determined by vastly differing contexts in diverse regions of the world. The opportunity which SDG 4 presents us with must be used to consider children in a global sense rather than splitting them into arbitrary categories.