Despite growing interest in early childhood development globally, internationally validated tools to assess the development of children under the age of three at population level remain scarce. In the Global Scales for Early Development (GSED) project existing efforts have been brought together to develop a harmonized new methodology to assess development in children up to 36 months through measures that are culturally neutral, easy to administer, open access and acceptable and understandable to caregivers and children.
The GSED consist of two measures for population and programmatic evaluation: 1) a caregiver report Short Form (SF); and 2) a direct administration Long Form (LF). Current evidence indicates that the psychometric properties of the GSED SF and LF are comparable. A combination of GSED SF and LF may be used to increase measurement precision and sensitivity to potential changes following interventions. The GSED measures also include measures that are being tested (and can be made available on demand): 3) a caregiver report Household Form (HF) designed to be integrated into large-scale and national-level surveys for monitoring child development; and 4) a caregiver report Psychosocial Form (PF) to measure of children’s psychosocial skills and behaviours.