Adaptation of the Integrated Scales of Development for Normal Children 16 – 30 Months

Abstract

The scales of children development from the West are usually used as a main guide for parents and professionals inmonitoring the development of children due to the limited resources being reported and the assumption that childrendevelopment in Malaysia and Western countries are similar. Based on previous studies, many have questioned thesuitability of these scales to assess the communicative development of Malaysian children. Therefore, this preliminarystudy was conducted to develop a set of data that could be use as a guide to monitor the communicative developmentof Malaysian toddlers. In this study, translation and adaptation was done on The Integrated Scales of Development fortoddlers aged between 16 to 30 months which was further divided to three subscales according to age ie. 16 to 18months, 19 to 24 months and 25 to 30 months. Validity and reliability measurements were conducted on the adaptedscales. Based on the validity assessment, two items were omitted from the subscale 16-18 months and eight items wereomitted from each subscale 19-24 months and subscale 25-30 months. The value of Cronbach alpha showed highreliability on the subscale 16-18 months (α = 0.872). However, the value of Cronbach alpha in subscale 19-24 months(α = 0.626) and in subscale 25-30 months (α = 0.628) demonstrated low reliability. As a conclusion, the adapted scaleis suitable to be used as a guide to monitor children communicative development but not as a major tool of assessment.