Supporting Educators to Identify Children’s Symptomatic Behaviours Indicating Developmental Delays with the Development of Symptomatic Behaviour Screening Tool (SymBest).

Abstract

The primary focus of this research is to develop a web app screening tool for early childhood educators to identify children with developmental delays through behavioural behaviours. Symptomatic Behaviour Screening Tool (SymBest) is a behaviour difficulties screening tool for early childhood educators to screen and identify symptomatic behaviours among children aged 3 to 4 years old in the ECE center. The development of SymBest is based on the theory of maturation and the theory of cognitive development along with developmentally appropriate framework (DAP). Fuzzy Delphi analysis was conducted with 18 participants from diverse backgrounds of clinical and education to gain the expert consensus on the suitability of the constructs and items representing SymBest. The findings showed that the experts have a fair degree of agreement on the constructs and the items suggested to form SymBest. It is a fully featured web app with several functions like instant scoring upon, scores interpretations, overall interpretation, constructs and items in dual languages ( English language and Bahasa Melayu) and saving the report in the PDF file. SymBest is also optimised for mobile and personal computer users with Andriod, IOS and PC operating system.