Nottingham Toddler Lab

Research into Perceptual and Cognitive Development

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Nottingham Child Development Study

Validation of a parent report measure of cognitive development for very premature infants

‘Cognitive development’ is the process by which babies’ learn thinking, reasoning, memory, and language skills during their early years.

Babies who are born very premature are at a higher risk of having delayed cognitive development than children who are born full term. Assessing a child’s development is therefore an important part of standard medical care for babies who have been born very premature, and is also an essential part of research studies looking at the effects of premature birth.

We wanted to find a quick and efficient way of assessing children’s cognitive development to help medical professionals and researchers, and to reduce the amount of time parents need to spend at clinic appointments for medical or research purposes.

We adapted a questionnaire of cognitive development that can be completed by parents of children who have been born very premature. To find out whether our questionnaire is useful we needed to know if parents’ answers on the questionnaire give us a good picture of how their child is actually developing. To do this we had to compare parents’ questionnaire scores with their child’s score on a formal developmental assessment carried out by a psychologist.

A big thank-you goes to the 77 families with 2-year-old (very premature) children from the East Midlands who took part in the study. The parents completed our questionnaire and then brought their child in for a developmental assessment around one week later.

All the parents and children enjoyed taking part and we were very pleased with the results. As we had hoped, we found that the parents’ questionnaire scores were similar to the child’s assessment scores. This told us that:

• Our questionnaire is a quick and efficient way of finding out how very premature children are developing when they are 2 years old
• Medical professionals and researchers can use our questionnaire to tell them how children are developing without the children having a long developmental test at a clinic
• Parents are good judges of their very premature child’s cognitive development

As the questionnaire proved to be a very useful way of assessing cognitive development it is now being used by consultants in hospitals in Nottingham as part of their follow-up care for very premature babies. It is also being used in a number of large research studies across the UK.

As many of the studies that are being carried out at the Nottingham Toddler Lab are interested in different aspects of children’s cognitive development you might be asked to fill out this questionnaire if you decide to help us with our research here in Nottingham! This study was funded by an MRC grant awarded to Professor Neil Marlow (Nottingham) and Professor Dieter Wolke (Bristol) supplemental to the United Kingdom Oscillation Study (UKOS).