Advancing the Sustainable Development Goal for Education Through Developmentally Informed Approaches to Measurement

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

Longitudinal Pathways from Cumulative Contextual Risk at Birth to School Functioning in Adolescence: Analysis of Mediation Effects and Gender Moderation

Children and adolescents exposed to multiple contextual risks are more likely to have academic difficulties and externalizing behavior problems than those who experience fewer risks. This study used data from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1986 (a population-based study; N = 6,961; 51% female) to investigate (a) the impact of cumulative contextual risk at birth on adolescents’ academic performance and misbehavior in school, (b) learning difficulties and/or externalizing behavior problems in childhood as intervening mechanisms in the association of cumulative contextual risk with functioning in adolescence, and (c) potential gender differences in the predictive associations of cumulative contextual risk at birth with functioning in childhood or adolescence. The results of the structural equation modeling analysis suggested that exposure to cumulative contextual risk at birth had negative associations with functioning 16 years later, and academic difficulties and externalizing behavior problems in childhood mediated some of the predictive relations. Gender, however, did not moderate any of the associations. Therefore, the findings of this study have implications for the prevention of learning and conduct problems in youth and future research on the impact of cumulative risk exposure