KEEP uses EDI in the Kyrgyz Republic
The Kyrgyz Republic is restructuring their pre-primary education under a plan called the Kyrgyz Early Education Project (KEEP). The project intends to increase preschool delivery to improve children’s developmental outcomes and future success. Although the Kyrgyz Republic scored poorly among nations that participated in the 2006 and 2009 rounds of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), children who attended kindergarten did better than those who did not. With kindergarten as a major focus, KEEP planned to increase teaching time from 240 hours a year to 480 hours and expand community-based kindergartens.
One of the ways chosen to track the effectiveness of the project was with the Early Development Instrument.
Before using the EDI for program evaluation, the EDI required adaptation and pilot testing.
The EDI adaptation process involved translating the questionnaire into Kyrgyz and Russian, making the Kyrgyz Republic the only country outside of Canada with the EDI translated into two languages. This occurred in March 2014 and allowed pilot implementations starting in May 2014 to establish the EDI’s validity.
Two pilot tests occurred before a baseline collection. The Offord Centre for Child Studies implemented these collections with the Ministry of Education and Science of the Kyrgyz Republic and the National Testing Centre.
The goal of the pilot implementations was to assess the appropriateness of the EDI in the Kyrgyz Republic. The initial pilot collected EDI data on 656 children and demonstrated the feasibility of the EDI in the Kyrgyz Republic. The results followed similar patterns as data from Canada and other countries. Much like in other countries, girls did better than boys, and older children did better than younger children.
A second pilot study occurred in November/December 2015. The collection included 3,156 students and 116 teachers who would be part of the initial baseline collection in April 2016. The pre-baseline implementation offered an opportunity to further refine training and quality control processes with the feedback from the National Testing Centre and teachers.
Once again the larger collection confirmed the appropriateness of using the EDI in the Kyrgyz Republic, with the results following similar patterns to those in Canada and other countries.
The third phase of the EDI implementation was a collection of baseline data. Its goal was to set baseline score distribution patterns to allow researchers to assess changes in future samples, much as it is done in other jurisdictions where the EDI is used. A total of 2,954 children were a part of the baseline collection.
The results of the baseline implementation are currently being analyzed.
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