For Peter Halpin, Ph.D., where there’s a measurement, there’s a way.
As a quantitative methodologist and psychometrician, he has made a career out of navigating how to address pressing questions faced by education researchers and policy makers. And, as an associate professor at the UNC School of Education, he’s continuing to ask pressing questions about how to improve measurement and assessment in settings ranging from national surveys and large-scale program evaluations, to state and district education policy, to peer learning and group dynamics within classrooms.
When you can measure something, he said, you can study it, and Halpin’s research has long focused on how measurement can inform policy, particularly when related to early childhood development and equitable access to education across the globe.
“Early childhood development and educational opportunity are something I believe in a lot, especially in the developing world. I think that’s an important thing to contribute to as a researcher,” he said. “It’s hard to improve on something if you can’t measure it.”
Through his research and his partnerships with groups looking for his expertise on targeted educational measurements, Halpin continues to look for answers.
And, “How do I do this?” is a question he never stops asking himself.
Psychometrics and the child development puzzle
Halpin studied psychology at the University of Calgary, and by the time he was pursuing his Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University, he’d become interested in psychometrics, how psychosocial constructs — things like achievement, personality or emotions — are quantified, and how the statistical analyses of these constructs can be used to improve lives.
This kind of methodology used to develop educational assessments had been successfully applied to subjects like reading and math. A need for that same level of statistical rigor on the measurement of the softer skills that are often used to track a young child’s development — like social emotional learning or collaborative problem solving — was becoming an increasingly important part of the child development puzzle.
“In education, the stakes for psychometric research are high,” Halpin said. “You have achievement tests and performance assessments, and the field uses the most advanced methods with the most statistical rigor to develop these kinds of measures. I was drawn to that.”
Once Halpin found the intersection of education and psychology in psychometrics, he knew it could be a game-changer for one of the biggest questions in the field: how do we take the methodological lessons learned from the development of high-stakes assessments and use them to improve measurement across a broader range constructs and settings?
In 2018, UNICEF reached out to Halpin to address that “how” on a global scale. Could he help revise a previous version of an early childhood assessment for use in the developing world?
Goal 4 in the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Target 4.2 of that goal is to ensure that by 2030, all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education.
Halpin was being asked to help develop and validate an assessment that could be used to measure one of 4.2’s indicators – “Proportion of children aged 24-59 months who are developmentally on track in health, learning and psychosocial well-being, by sex.”
Halpin’s work typically follows two paths. One is the improvement of statistical methodology used in educational measurement, so that the methods work better in a wider range of settings. The other is applying those methods to develop measures that can provide researchers with the tools needed to conduct research on a larger scale. His work with the UN would require drawing from both lines of work.
An updated, rigorously designed assessment tool to measure these three factors — health, learning, and psychological well-being — would need to be administered by multiple countries, across multiple languages and cultures. When he thought about this goal, his reaction was a familiar one — how?
“It sounded impossible,” he said. “How can you measure all these broad concepts and create an assessment you can apply across the globe?
“We couldn’t do the kinds of things you’d do in a western context, like adaptive testing or computer-based scoring. It seemed like such a challenge to reliably, fairly, validly measure all these developmental domains while ensuring the resulting survey would be feasible to implement across the globe. But I believed that this was a problem worth solving.”
It was an incredible technical undertaking. Over nearly five years, the team asked their own questions to drill down to the right kinds of data to seek, designed measurements and analyzed data, and they emerged with a group of questions that would provide the least-biased comparisons across cultures. The result was a caregiver survey with 20 questions that focus on health, learning, and psychosocial well-being for children ages 2-5 that can be administered around the world.
With the data collected, UNICEF published the Early Childhood Development Index ECDI2030, which countries can use to monitor progress against the goal. The ECDI2030 is available in multiple languages and includes implementation tools such as interviewer guidelines, trainings, reporting templates, and more.
Halpin co-authored a paper, “Monitoring early childhood development at the population level: The ECDI2030,” in Early Childhood Research Quarterly in 2024 outlining their process for developing the survey and providing initial results from the survey in Mexico and the State of Palestine.
“Sustainable development goals are about advocating for investment in certain sectors within a country,” Halpin said. “There’s a lot of evidence on how poverty, malnutrition, and other stressors early in life have detrimental effects on lifelong outcomes like employment, income and mental health.
“But we didn’t have good direct measures of early childhood development that could validate theoretical models or advocate for investment in early childcare and related areas. The goal is that, by the end of 2030, all United Nations partners will have administered the survey at least once.
“It has a lot of potential to improve early childhood development outcomes worldwide.”
When answers bring more questions
When Halpin joined the project to develop the SDG indicator, it was classified as Tier 3 — with no methodology for the indicator, and it wasn’t being measured. The indicator is now at Tier 2, which means there is now, in part to his participation, an internationally recognized method for measuring early childhood development across these three factors.
To reach Tier 1, the survey needs to be administered in at least half of the countries where it’s applicable. Data collection has been completed in 12 countries so far and is in progress in another 40. The goal is to reach 80 countries by 2030.
From a psychometrician’s standpoint, Halpin’s part of the project is complete — he helped develop a way to obtain population-level data about early childhood development in international settings.
But, now, he has more questions. How will we explain variation in child development observed across countries? Where should countries invest their limited funds to make the most impact on early childhood development and school readiness? He’ll continue to collaborate with UNICEF on the data as it becomes available.
“These kinds of questions all captivate my interest. And I love being able to say – ‘I’m going to figure out how to measure that.’”