The predictive value of universal preschool developmental assessment in identifying children with later educational difficulties: A systematic review.

This review was the first to systematically assess the predictive value of preschool developmental assessment at a population level on later educational outcomes. Results demonstrated consistent associations between relatively poor early child development and later educational difficulties. In general, specificity and Negative Predictive Value are high, suggesting that young children who perform well in developmental assessment are unlikely to go on to develop educational difficulties, however the sensitivity and Positive Predictive Values were generally low, indicating that these assessments would not meet the requirements for a screening test. For surveillance purposes, however, findings suggested that combined measures provided the best results, although these are resource intensive and thus difficult to implement in universal child health programmes. Health service providers may therefore wish to consider using stand-alone measures, which also were shown to provide adequate predictive value, such as the ASQ.