Ep. 9 - Cultural Considerations When Developing Milestones with Dr. Dana McCoy

Dana Charles McCoy is an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Her work focuses on understanding the ways that poverty-related risk factors in children's home, school, and neighborhood environments affect the development of their cognitive and socioemotional skills in early childhood. Her research looks at both domestic and international contexts.   Dr. McCoy will speak to us about her work developing The Caregiver Reported Early Development Index (CREDI) and how it is used to measure population-level development for children under age 3 as an easy, cost-effective, and culturally-neutral way of gathering data. CREDI helps to identify basic, universal that can be seen and measured taking into account cultural considerations. This has been especially helpful as other forms of assessment continue to be outdated or only viewed through one cultural lens. We hope that this episode will help you to see that just because values are different amongst groups doesn't mean they are wrong!   To learn more about Dr. McCoy’s research, please visit https://seed.gse.harvard.edu/