Transcultural adaptation and psychometric properties of the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) in Brazilian pre-school children

Early childhood is a sensitive period for development, and it is important to use psychometrically sound instruments to assess the child's developmental abilities. The International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) represents an innovative, feasible and low-cost assessment tool for preschool children that evaluates motor development, pre-numeracy, pre-literacy, and socioemotional development. These areas of development represent “key” skills for early development and school readiness. The objectives of this study were to translate the IDELA to Brazilian Portuguese, to conduct its cultural adaptation to the Brazilian population, to analyze its content validity, to assess its inter-rater reliability, to analyze the internal consistency of its sub-domains and to investigate associations between the child's IDELA scores and sociodemographic characteristics of the family. This was a descriptive, cross-sectional study, in which a sample of 565 preschool children were assessed with the IDELA in the city of Embu das Artes, São Paulo. Results indicated that the IDELA was successfully translated and culturally adapted to the Brazilian population, presenting adequate content validity, good internal consistency of its sub-domains and very high inter-rater reliability. Among the evaluated children, the girls' mean scores were higher than the boys' mean scores; 5-year-old children had higher scores than 4-year-old children; a positive correlation was observed between maternal education and the children's mean scores in the total IDELA, the pre-mathematics and the socioemotional subdomains. In conclusion, the Brazilian version of the IDELA proved to be feasible, adequate and reliable to assess early childhood development and school readiness of preschool age children in Brazil. Future studies could use the IDELA to provide relevant data about the children's development and school readiness in other Brazilian regions that will be useful in the planning of public health and education policies to improve children's integral development and their academic achievement.