Professionals can learn a great deal about young children’s emerging language and communication skills by consulting the ones who know the children best: their parents or caregivers. Now, with the CDIs and their Spanish adaptation, the Inventarios, professionals can tap into parents’ invaluable day-to-day knowledge – and respond to legislation that requires parental input in child evaluations. Top language researchers developed these standardized, parent-completed report forms – CDIs for English speakers and Inventarios for Spanish speakers – designing the forms to focus on current behaviors and on salient emergent skills and behaviors that parents can recognize and track. Both the CDIs and the Inventarios have three components:
– User’s Guide and Technical Manual. The manuals for CDIs and Inventarios are both in English, but each has been tailored to the content of its corresponding tool. Both provide detailed instructions for administering, scoring, and interpreting the forms; various uses of the inventories for clinical and research purposes; background information on the development of the forms; technical reports on reliability and validity; and tables and graphs of norming data.