Can Touch Screen Tablets be Used to Assess Cognitive and Motor Skills in Early Years Primary School Children? A Cross-Cultural Study

Abstract

Assessment of cognitive and motor functions is fundamental for developmental and neuropsychological profiling. Assessments are usually conducted on an individual basis, with a trained examiner, using standardized paper and pencil tests, and can take up to an hour or more to complete, depending on the nature of the test. This makes traditional standardized assessments of child development largely unsuitable for use in low-income countries. Touch screen tablets afford the opportunity to assess cognitive functions in groups of participants, with untrained administrators, with precision recording of responses, thus automating the assessment process. In turn, this enables cognitive profiling to be conducted in contexts where access to qualified examiners and standardized assessments are rarely available. As such, touch screen assessments could provide a means of assessing child development in both low- and high-income countries, which would afford cross-cultural comparisons to be made with the same assessment tool. However, before touch screen tablet assessments can be used for cognitive profiling in low-to-high-income countries they need to be shown to provide reliable and valid measures of performance. We report the development of a new touch screen tablet assessment of basic cognitive and motor functions for use with early years primary school children in low- and high-income countries. Measures of spatial intelligence, visual attention, short-term memory, working memory, manual processing speed, and manual coordination are included as well as mathematical knowledge. To investigate if this new touch screen assessment tool can be used for cross-cultural comparisons we administered it to a sample of children (N = 283) spanning standards 1–3 in a low-income country, Malawi, and a smaller sample of children (N = 70) from first year of formal schooling from a high-income country, the UK. Split-half reliability, test-retest reliability, face validity, convergent construct validity, predictive criterion validity, and concurrent criterion validity were investigated. Results demonstrate “proof of concept” that touch screen tablet technology can provide reliable and valid psychometric measures of performance in the early years, highlighting its potential to be used in cross-cultural comparisons and research.

Similarities and differences across countries in the development of executive functions in children: A systematic review

“…The administration of standardized computer‐based tasks constitutes one possible approach to limiting effects of methodological thresholds. Studies assessing reliability and validity of cognitive tasks, such as visual attention and short‐term memory, offer support for the notion that this form of assessment presents a promising approach to cross‐cultural assessment (Pitchford & Outhwaite, ).…”

Early executive functioning in a global context: Developmental continuity and family protective factors

“…Until recently, developmental researchers studying young children in LMIC have primarily focused on measuring general cognitive skills (Aboud & Yousafzai, ). Given the growing interest in directly assessing children's EFs in LMIC (Obradović, Yousafzai, et al., 2016; Oluwole, Noll, Winger, Akinyanju, & Novelli, ; Pitchford & Outhwaite, ; Wolf & McCoy, ), it is important to understand how antecedent cognitive skills relate to emergent EFs. Using the widely employed Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, we found that direct assessments of general cognitive skills at 24 months were significantly related to children's performance on EF tasks at 48 months.…”

“…Many challenges arise when researchers employ tests developed and validated with children living in HIC to assess cognitive skills of children in LMIC (see Pitchford & Outhwaite, 2016;Zuilkowski, McCoy, Serpell, Matafwali, & Fink, 2016). We want to highlight three issues in conducting EF assessments with preschool children in rural LMIC settings at scale.…”

“…Until recently, developmental researchers studying young children in LMIC have primarily focused on measuring general cognitive skills (Aboud & Yousafzai, 2015). Given the growing interest in directly assessing children's EFs in LMIC (Obradović, Yousafzai, et al, 2016;Oluwole, Noll, Winger, Akinyanju, & Novelli, 2016;Pitchford & Outhwaite, 2016;Wolf & McCoy, 2017), it is important to understand how antecedent cognitive skills relate to emergent EFs.…”

Development, feasibility and acceptability of a gamified cognitive DEvelopmental assessment on an E-Platform (DEEP) in rural Indian pre-schoolers – a pilot study

“…Metrics such as game accuracy and completion time have been shown to differ according to difficulty of the task and age of participants [42]. The potential utility of these gamified tablet-based tasks for cognitive assessment in young children is further supported through preliminary evidence of their reliability and validity against gold standard assessments of child development [43,44].…”