Global Scales for Early Development (GSED) for 0-3 year olds – Development, Purpose and Next Steps

Chair(s)

• 

  Susanne Martin Herz, MD, PhD (she/her/hers)

  Associate Professor
  University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine
  San Francisco, California, United States

Session

Description: This Hot Topic Symposium will introduce the audience to the World Health Organization’s recently-finalized Global Scales for Early Development (GSED)—a tool for measuring early childhood development (ECD) for children 0-3 years old at the population and group levels. Although global attention to ECD has greatly expanded, few feasible and globally relevant measures of development existed for the youngest children, particularly for population-level measurement. GSED efforts harmonized existing work and added new methodology to develop a package of measures intended to be globally applicable, easy to administer, open access, and acceptable and understandable to caregivers and children. The first talk will introduce GSED and describe their development. It will introduce the Developmental score (D-score) - a holistic measure across multiple developmental domains - and the norm-referenced development-for-age Z-score (DAZ), similar to Height- and Weight-for-Age Z-scores for physical growth. The second talk will describe the two measures currently available for population and programmatic evaluation, a caregiver-reported Short Form (SF) and a directly administered Long Form (LF), which can be used together to increase measurement precision and sensitivity. Tablet-based administration and details for implementation (materials, training) will also be discussed. The third talk will focus on the ongoing next steps (GSED 2.0), including development of global norms, evaluation of GSED’s prediction of later development, use with preterm infants, and preliminary investigation into GSED with individual children. GSED is an exciting addition to support monitoring of children’s development at the population level during a key early period of brain growth and development.

Presentations:

• 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM ET

  Introduction and Describe the Global Scales for Early Development measures and their development
  

  Speaker: Ann M. Weber, MS, MPH, PhD (she/her/hers) – University of Nevada, Reno
• 11:30 AM – 11:50 AM ET

  Understand the purpose and uses of the Global Scales for Early Development and determine their relevance for your own work
  

  Speaker: Magdalena Janus, PhD (she/her/hers) – McMaster University
• 11:50 AM – 12:20 PM ET

  Describe next steps in Global Scales for Early Development norming and validation and potential relevance for your work; Q&A
  

  Speaker: Susanne Martin Herz, MD, PhD (she/her/hers) – University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine