Battelle Developmental Inventory

Abstract

In 1986, Congress passed Public Law 99–457, which provided incentives for states to develop early childhood intervention programs for qualified infants and toddlers from birth through 2 years of age and their families. The law later became known as the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA),1 and, with the 1997 amendments, the early intervention program became Part C of the Act. Part C of IDEA defines the terms “evaluation” and “assessment” as they relate to early intervention programs. “Evaluation” means procedures used to determine a child's initial and continuing eligibility for services. Eligibility criteria are defined by each state, but they typically include documentation of delay in one or more areas of development listed in the federal law, including cognitive, adaptive (self-help), physical (eg, gross and fine motor), communication, and social-emotional development. “Assessment” is defined as ongoing procedures to identify a child's strengths and needs, and the services required to meet those needs. This is the process of program planning. Evaluation requires what Kirshner and Guyatt referred to as a “discriminative index,” which distinguishes “between individuals or groups on an underlying dimension when no external criterion or gold standard is available for validating these measures.”2 Measures useful for determining a child's eligibility for services are those that can be used to differentiate between children who have developmental delays and children who do not have such delays.3 Discriminative measures include test items that distinguish between children of varying ages, such as stacking blocks or jumping down from a step. Although such information is can be useful for determining whether a child has a developmental delay, knowledge that a child can or cannot perform such test items often is not useful for program planning purposes. Program planning often requires identification of goals specific to an individual, particularly when intervention is unlikely to enable a child to “catch up” with typically developing peers.3 Another purpose of measurement is what Kirshner and Guyatt referred to as “evaluation.” They defined evaluation as a measure of “the magnitude of longitudinal change in an individual or group on the dimension of interest.”2 Although progress toward individual goals is usually the most appropriate measure of progress for individual children,3 early intervention programs must implement program-based outcome studies that look at longitudinal changes in children and families receiving services.4 One tool that has been used for both determining children's eligibility for services and measuring change longitudinally for program-based studies is the Battelle Developmental Inventory (BDI).5 The BDI was developed in 1984 and is both normreferenced and criterion-referenced. It is a comprehensive test of development that evaluates the 5 domains of development listed in Part C of IDEA: cognitive, adaptive (self-help), motor, communication, and personal-social development. Each of the domains is further divided into subdomains, which can be scored separately. In addition to covering the 5 areas of development listed in the law, an advantage of the BDI is that it covers an age range from birth to 8 years, which is a wider range than that of many other tests that can be used with infants. The wide age range facilitates longitudinal comparisons of the same measure over a longer period of time than is possible with most other tests. Examiners can administer the items for each domain separately, or they can test all 5 domains of development. This aspect of the BDI is useful if different team members evaluate different domains of development. A physical therapist, for example, might administer items in the motor domain, an occupational therapist might administer the adaptive items, a speech-language pathologist might administer the communication items, and a teacher might administer the personal-social and cognitive items. The BDI has 3 administration formats: structured administration, observation, and interviews with parents or other sources. The authors provide detailed instructions for the structured administration procedure, making it, in our opinion, the most clear-cut format to administer and score, followed by observation and then the interview approach.6 Another feature of the structured administration format that sets the BDI apart from other tools is that it allows examiners to make specific adaptations for children with disabilities when needed. It also allows some deviation from the exact words if the child does not understand the instructions. The availability of 3 test formats increases the likelihood that children receive the highest possible score for all skills they can perform. If a child does not perform well or refuses to perform activities during the structured administration format, the examiner may ask the child's parents or teachers whether the child can p