Abstract
While the past decade has seen increased global efforts to develop reliable and valid measures of developmental phenomena for use in diverse populations within and across countries, the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in particular the education goal (SDG4) have revealed a dearth of meaningful and valid measures and indicators to monitor countries’ progress toward achieving the 10 SDG4 targets. Developmental science can a) inform the choice of outcomes, processes, and mechanisms that yield the greatest promise in advancing countries ability to formulate solutions; and b) provide guidance on how to measure educational phenomena to ensure maximum policy relevance. Moving forward, developmental science will need to provide rigorous evidence on measures that incorporate the principles of bioecological frameworks on human development and learning to capture the complexity of the multi-level, multi-dimensional, dynamic processes of development and learning that are relevant to achieving SDG4. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations for how developmental scientists can ensure that their research is directly relevant to and can best support the SDG process.
Authors’ note: Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Alice Wuermli, Global TIES for Children, New York University, 411 Lafayette, Room 526, alice.wuermli@nyu.edu. We thank Drs. Jere Behrman (University of Pennsylvania), Paul Hastings (University of California, Davis), Hirokazu Yoshikawa (New York University, co-Director Global TIES for Children), and members of the Yoshikawa lab at NYU for invaluable feedback at multiple stages of writing this chapter. We further thank NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute for core support to the Global TIES for Children Center at NYU, which supported research activities that directly contributed to this chapter.
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Wuermli, A.J., von Suchodoletz, A., Abubakar, A. (2018). Advancing the Sustainable Development Goal for Education Through Developmentally Informed Approaches to Measurement. In: Verma, S., Petersen, A. (eds) Developmental Science and Sustainable Development Goals for Children and Youth. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 74. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96592-5_16
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