Promoting global ECD top‐down and bottom‐up

Abstract

Early childhood science and intervention (ECSI) or simply early childhood development (ECD) is now a multi‐billion‐dollar industry that seeks to export one form of family model, parenting practices, and perspective of child development to the rest of the world. This practice occurs through the efforts of agencies such as the World Health Organization, United Nations Children's Fund, the World Bank Group, and the LEGO Foundation. As a result, Gabriel Scheidecker and colleagues (2023) are justified to characterize ECSI as global ECD that seeks to improve the brains of children in the majority world to break the vicious cycle of poverty. I complement Scheidecker et al.’s (2023) arguments by highlighting a key link that sustains global ECD—the academics and practitioners from the majority world who, knowingly or unknowingly, perpetuate this practice. In this commentary, I discuss why and how such academics and practitioners contribute to the practice of global ECD.

Developing and Validating a Soft Skills Assessment Scale for Psychoeducational Assessment

“…Muchera and Finch (2010) posited that some scales' lack of construct equivalence is possibly due to some human society's differing nature of beliefs, norms, and values. To a larger extent, Africa has failed and is still failing to produce knowledge, concepts, models, and contextually relevant theories to solve African problems (Oppong, 2013(Oppong, , 2023a(Oppong, , 2023b. A similar construct to western intelligence is wisdom (Oppong, 2020).…”

“…There is a need for localized soft skill assessment scales since ''people of different cultures differ not only in ability and process that the researcher test for, but also in those abilities the researcher test with'' (Grigorenko et al, 2001, p. 368). Dependence on international assessment scales or scales developed in the Minority World has raised concern about how intelligence and other abilities are assessed within African context (Oppong, 2017(Oppong, , 2023bOppong et al, , 2023Oppong & Strader, 2022;Scheidecker et al, 2022). According to Oppong (2020), the Western model of cognitive abilities is valuable but limited in its capacity to account for the various conceptualizations of valued abilities in different human societies.…”