Our Developmental Assessment gathers 422 developmental milestones that are divided into 48 skills. Subsequently, these skills are divided into the four areas of early childhood development that our model will impact: physical, cognitive, social and emotional, and linguistic.
The notion of developmental milestones is widely used in developmental psychology and pediatrics to study growth and development patterns, from which guidelines of normal development are created. A developmental milestone defines the culmination of an expected developmental pattern for children in a specific timeframe and who achieve, for example, taking three or more steps without any help. This approach allows us to understand general patterns while we also recognize the many individual variations that occur among children.
Our developmental milestones are based on the guidelines proposed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but, thanks to the integrity of our psychometric scale, we go beyond a simple theoretical list and have evidence that each milestone’s description is formulated in an understandable and observable way; caregivers won’t need the mediation of any professionals, which is sometimes the case with other existing scales.
The Developmental Assessment is the cornerstone of Kinedu’s programs, and as a result of five years of research and the use of statistical analysis as rigorous as the ones used to validate scales such as the WISK, the HAMAT, or the PLI; we have normative data from more than 2,000 parents of 15 different Spanish-speaking countries that support the validity, reliability, internal structure, and predictive value of our Developmental Assessment. This means that the developmental milestones are redacted in an accessible way, they describe the observable acquisition of specific skills, measure the concepts we need each time they’re used, and show and predict the link between time and skill acquisition during the first four years of life.
To support our commitment towards the science of Early Childhood Development, we are currently collaborating with top-level institutions and professionals that share our passion for innovation and education. We would like to highlight the Frontiers of Innovation initiative of Harvard Center on the Developing Child; the work of Michael Frank, Ph.D., and the Language and Cognition Lab of Stanford University; and the Aceleradora de Innovación para la Primera Infancia (Accelerator for Innovation in Early Childhood).
The impact of the Skills Model of Kinedu goes beyond the app since it gives the caregivers a frame of reference with which they can understand and observe the development of each child in their individuality. For our team, it was vital to make sure that the model was proved in different contexts and circumstances, so we applied it in different areas of the United States and Mexico to ensure that it is accessible to parents and caregivers no matter their social context or Spanish-speaking country of origin (projects in Valley Settlement and with Escobedo’s local government).
