Gesell Developmental Schedules

The Gesell Developmental Schedules are a set of developmental metrics which outline the ages & stages of development in young children developed by Dr. Arnold Gesell and colleagues. The original scale is generally considered not to satisfy the standards of rigor currently accepted in the field of psychometrics and is no longer used as an evaluative rubric in the clinical context. The most current form of the schedules comes from the Gesell Institute of Child Development and is known as the Gesell Developmental Observation-Revised for ages 2 ½ to 9 years. This assessment uses the principles of the schedules to determine the developmental age & stage of a any given child. The Gesell Developmental Schedules are a set of developmental metrics which outline the ages & stages of development in young children developed by Dr. Arnold Gesell and colleagues. The original scale is generally considered not to satisfy the standards of rigor currently accepted in the field of psychometrics and is no longer used as an evaluative rubric in the clinical context. The most current form of the schedules comes from the Gesell Institute of Child Development and is known as the Gesell Developmental Observation-Revised for ages 2 ½ to 9 years. This assessment uses the principles of the schedules to determine the developmental age & stage of a any given child. The Gesell Developmental Schedule was first published in 1925. The original scale was based on the normative data that was collected from a carefully conducted longitudinal study of early human development. The study focused on the various stages of developing and how they unfolded over time.Throughout the years, it has been subjected to extensive research and has subsequently been refined and updated. The first revision was published in 1940. When Dr. Gesell retired from Yale in 1950, Yale retained ownership of the birth to age 3 schedules and Yale continued to refine them although they were never republished named as Gesell Schedules. The schedules for older children became the property of Gesell Institute of Child Development which was established in 1950. In 1964 Dr. Francis Ilg and Dr. Louise Bates Ames, the founders of the Gesell Institute, refined, revised, and collected data on children 5-10 years of age and subsequently in 1965, 1972, and 1979. The results were published in School Readiness: Behavior Tests used at the Gesell Institute. In 2011, the instrument was revised and data was collected only on ages 3-6 years. Today, it is one of the oldest and most established intelligence measures of young children. Once the leading infant intelligence measure from the 1930s through the 1960s, the Gesell Developmental Schedule was nothing short of a breakthrough in infant ability testing when it was first constructed- the first of its kind, actually.