Developmental Assessment

How Will I Learn about Development?

You will learn the basics of development during the clerkship, and your learning will be made easier if you make a conscious effort to observe infants, children, and adolescents wherever you encounter them, not just in the hospital or clinic. Ask yourself, “What does this child do that gives me clues about development?” Include observations about development at every clinical encounter, even for minor illnesses, and ask parents to tell you how they perceive their child’s development compared with siblings or peers at the same age. Ask whether parents have concerns about development. Listen to what parents say, even if you cannot immediately provide an answer. Efforts to categorize the development of each patient will enhance your overall clinical skills and will allow you to add important information to case presentations.

What Observations Should I Make?

Watch the reaction of each patient as you enter the examination room. Observe the ways that infants react to parents and to the environment around them, including you. Think about how the reactions of toddlers provide information about their developmental progress, which will also help you gain insight about how to interact more effectively with them. Watch children play so that you may gain an appreciation of the progress they make physically, cognitively, socially, and emotionally. Pay attention to the ways that children and adolescents interact with each other, with parents, and with you. Look at physical abilities—walking, running, climbing, holding, and manipulating objects. Listen to language—content, complexity, understandability. In short, keep your eyes and ears open!

How Do I Recognize the Patterns of Developmental Progress?

Initially, identify the changes that occur with advancing age. What does a 1-month-old baby do that a newborn does not? When do you first notice that an infant can voluntarily open and close a hand? Can a 2-year-old hop on one foot? How about a 3-year-old or a 4-year-old? When can you understand most of the words and phrases spoken by a child? What behaviors do you observe in toddlers, school-age children, and adolescents? How much cooperation does a patient demonstrate during the physical examination? Soon, you will recognize that skills in a variety of areas all have predictable patterns of developmental progress and can be organized into broad categories, which will make your observations more useful. You will learn to expect certain skills and behaviors in patients at a given age. You may even begin to predict the age of a child based on developmental achievements. Frequent use of a reference for expected developmental progress will let you evaluate the observations that you make and help you become conversant with the developmental sequence more rapidly: The Denver Developmental Assessment (Denver II) is a widely used screening tool for children up to age 6, Bright Futures is a useful online resource for health supervision, and the Early Language Milestones provides a timeline of language development.

What Are the Major Areas of Development?

Development is usually divided into broad categories: motor, language, cognition, problem solving, and psychosocial. These categories facilitate ongoing surveillance. Each links to the others and is influenced by progress in the others. An individual’s overall development represents the totality of the interaction. A practical approach to categorizing development can be found in the Denver II, which provides population-based norms for development in four “streams”: gross motor, fine motor/adaptive, language, and personal/social (Figure 9-1). A separate stream devoted to cognition does not appear in the Denver II, but the fine motor/adaptive, language, and personal/social streams all reflect cognitive development. Other, more formal developmental assessment tools use more complex categorization schemes, but for your purposes during the clerkship, simple schemes suffice. The Bright Futures Pocket Guide provides useful lists of age-related developmental skills for day-to-day clinical evaluations.

Figure 9-1 The Denver Developmental Assessment (Denver II).

From Frankenburg WK et al: The Denver II: A major revision and restandardization of the Denver Developmental Screening Test. Pediatrics, 89:91–97,1992.

How Do I Determine if Development Is Age-appropriate?