Does the EDI Equivalently Measure Facets of School Readiness for Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal children?

The aim of the current paper was to examine the equivalence of the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a teacher rating measure of school readiness, for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. The current study used an approach, which analyzes the structure and properties of the EDI at the subdomain level. Similar subdomain score distributions would suggest that the EDI measures subdomains similarly for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups, whereas systematic variations in distributions would suggest the presence of bias at the subdomain level. The EDI was completed on a population of kindergarteners in 2003 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Results indicate that mean scores for all the domains and subdomains were significantly lower for Aboriginal children. However, the distributions of subdomains in which children were rated as ‘challenges exist’ were similar among both groups. The findings suggest an equivalent structure of the EDI at the subdomains level for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. The next step is to examine the specific correlates, beyond the structure of the EDI, that are associated with disparities in EDI subdomain scores, such as contextual factors and social conditions.