It was in 2008 during the Second International Workshop on Child Development that the FMCSV team came into contact with the Early Development Instrument (EDI), an instrument developed in Canada and aimed at measuring the degree of readiness for school of children under five years of age.
The EDI was created by the Offord Centre for Child Studies, connected to the McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. It is considered the earliest indicator of childhood development, since it reflects the conditions of children under five years of age, the first age in which it is possible to measure the degree of development.
The appraisal of the information is done through the use of questionnaires with parents, teachers and educators, with questions covering five areas of child development:
1) physical well-being;
2) social competence;
3) health and emotional maturity;
4) cognitive development and language;
5) communication skills and general knowledge
The EDI is a questionnaire with 100 questions that seeks to identify the extent to which a particular community has managed to stimulate and develop its children until school age, as well as indicate their degree of preparation to live and enjoy the school environment. The EDI is not used as an individual or sample score but as a population diagnostic applied to all children in a given population or community.
FMCSV translated all the material of the EDI into Portuguese and its adaptation to the Brazilian reality. The very creator of EDI, Dr. Magdalena Janus came to São Paulo and met with representatives of FMCSV and the six cities that participate in the Social Project so, together, they could check the compliance of the questions to the environment of Brazilian children.
The outcome of this effort was a “tropicalized” EDI, which has already been applied in pilot mode in all six cities and is being applied, in 2011, with all five-year-olds in day-care centers. This measurement, made now, will be used as a baseline for comparison with the next to be held in 2015, which will assess the degree of readiness of children who have been involved with FMCSV’s Social Project.