By Jenna Somers
Whether a young child lives in Guatemala or the Netherlands, whether they attend school in a mudbrick building with dirt floors or a state-of-the-art facility, is it possible to develop common measures to understand their health and development? How does child development differ across cultural contexts, and what are universal commonalities?
These questions guide the research of Jonathan Seiden, a new assistant professor of early childhood policy in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development. Internationally focused, his scholarship builds on the college’s established strengths in domestic early child policy and development research.
Seiden studies how early childhood education and health policies affect children’s lives by designing tests and statistical tools that allow governments and global partners to understand whether their investments translate into improved educational quality and learning and development outcomes.
In his previous work, Seiden collaborated with Save the Children to assess the quality of curriculum improvement and teacher training in state-run childcare centers in India and the Philippines and evaluated the effectiveness of parenting programs in several sub-Saharan countries. He continues to collaborate with the World Bank, for example by developing an assessment of preschool quality in Morrocco, following the country’s investment in nationwide preschool education.
“If we can identify which skills are more universal, that helps us provide a common language—a common metric—to compare across countries and different cultural contexts.”
Seiden also designs measurements that capture global and context-specific early health and development outcomes. “All the skills of child development fall on a spectrum of universality to specificity,” Seiden said. “If we can identify which skills are more universal, that helps us provide a common language—a common metric—to compare across countries and different cultural contexts.”
With a common language of numbers, policymakers could compare outcomes in their context to a global sample of children being raised in environments that allow them to reach their full developmental potential. These comparisons could help guide policies and target intervention to improve children’s lives.
Global Scales for Early Development
For the past few years, Seiden has contributed to the World Health Organization’s Global Scales for Early Development (GSED) project, an effort to design a tool to measure universal early child development outcomes. As part of a 12-country research team, Seiden is collaborating on a global norming study to examine how children develop when raised in nurturing home environments that promote early child development. By studying a globally diverse sample of children that benefit from, for example, parents reading or singing to their children, opportunities for play, and adequate nutrition, the team seeks to identify how child development looks when children can develop to their full potential.
“If a child is being raised in a pretty good environment, where they don’t have major constraints and are able to achieve their developmental potential, do we see similar curves of growth for learning, or do we see differences by country,” Seiden said. “My hope is that we don’t see differences, because then we could say, these are global norms of what development looks like in a reasonably healthy population. This could then be a useful metric for policymakers to understand the strength of early child development in their countries and where they need to intervene.”
The research team will also assess whether the global scale predicts later schooling outcomes. If it does, the scale could become a powerful tool for policymakers interested in improving education in their contexts.
Important early career research
The GSED study builds on Seiden’s earlier research published in two issues of The Lancet. In 2022, he was part of a team that published, “Estimates of a multidimensional index of nurturing care in the next 1000 days of life for children in low-income and middle-income countries: a modelling study.” This study was the first large-scale multidimensional synthesis quantifying preschool-aged children’s access to nurturing care in low- to middle-income countries. Only a quarter of 3-4-year-old children in these countries received minimally adequate nurturing care. Nutrition and health measures were most widely met, but just a third receive early learning and responsive caregiving. The findings offer a foundation for policies that align with global goals for early childhood development and care.
Seiden’s 2024 paper, “The next 1000 days: building on early investments for the health and development of young children,” establishes ages 2-5 as a key period of development for ensuring nurturing care, sustaining developmental gains, and addressing persistent and emergent developmental risks. The researchers highlight the need for integrated, multisector investments to ensure children across the globe have access to quality early childhood care and education and responsive caregiving.
A pragmatic approach to research
“I want to deliver data to people who can use that information to improve children’s lives.”
No matter where in the world his research takes him, Seiden values pragmatism. “I want to deliver data to people who can use that information to improve children’s lives. That leads to tensions between the technical rigor of research or methods being used, and the interpretability of results,” Seiden said.
“I can create a scale that has excellent psychometric properties, is very reliable and valid, but if I can’t explain what a one-unit increase on this scale means to a policymaker, what are they going to use it for? The value is in making data interpretable to non-technical audiences, so policymakers can understand the situation and what they need to do to help children thrive.”
