Key updates for the research community
The NIH Infant and Toddler Toolbox (aka the “NIH Baby Toolbox” or NBT) norming research study is in its final weeks with a nationally representative sample of 1-42 month old typically-developing infants and toddlers from English- and Spanish-speaking homes.
The researcher/clinician-user version of the NBT product will include age-based normed scores and change-sensitive growth scale values (GSVs) for individual assessments based on data from the above norming study. English- and Spanish-language versions of the administrator instructions and training, as well as child stimuli and instructions, and parent report surveys, will be available.
The NBT will focus on objective measurement. The iPad NBT app will contain automated and computer-assisted scoring, speeding the total time needed per assessment and significantly reducing the training and expertise needed to successfully administer NBT assessments.
Total administration time for the full NBT assessments will range from 35 minutes (infants) to no more than 75 minutes (toddlers).
The NBT app team created on-board eye-gaze tracking capabilities to facilitate objective measurement, especially in pre-verbal infants and toddlers.
Stay tuned for “ready for distribution” announcements in 2024!
Main Area of Focus
The NIH Infant and Toddler Toolbox (aka the “NIH Baby Toolbox” or NBT) is in development as a neurodevelopmental measurement tool that will be targeted for both research and clinical use in children 1- to 42-months of age and primarily include direct/objective child assessment but also parent/guardian report, where appropriate. The NIH Baby Toolbox is being designed largely from existing, published, and validated tests and protocols that have been used and accepted in the cognitive-, social-, behavioral-, and neuroscience-developmental fields. As planned, the NIH Baby Toolbox will be inexpensive to obtain, easy to administer within a relatively brief time frame appropriate to the population being studied, and able to capture multiple domains of neurodevelopment. These domains include: Cognition & Executive Function, Language, Numeracy/Early Mathematics, Self-Regulation, Social Functioning, and Motor. This work represents an extension of the current and widely used NIH Toolbox® for Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function suite of assessment tools for use in persons 3 years to 85 years of age. The NIH Baby Toolbox is being developed for use with an iPad and utilizes built-in eye-tracking and short clips of video recording to enable accurate, objective scoring, reaction times, and speed of habituation. The complete battery will be made available for assessment in both English and Spanish. Please refer to key updates at the top of this page for the most current information. Full public release of the NIH Baby Toolbox is scheduled to take place in 2024.
Background
In 2006, the NIH Blueprint awarded the NIH Toolbox® contract to develop a standard set of instruments to measure neurological and behavioral health in persons ages 3-85 to ensure that assessment methods and results could be used for comparisons across studies, thus maximizing the utility of data collected by NIH grantees. The same developers competitively won an additional NIH Blueprint contract awarded in 2019, to create an extended standard set of neurodevelopmental assessment measures in younger ages – namely in children 1- to 42-months of age, thus enabling a tool for the full life-course assessment of neurological and behavioral health to be shared by investigators and clinicians. The 5-year contract engages a national team of researchers led by Richard Gershon, PhD, at Northwestern University, for the creation of this NIH Infant and Toddler Toolbox (aka the “NIH Baby Toolbox” or NBT).
Contacts
Kathy Mann Koepke, PhD
Lead NIH Project Officer, NIH Baby Toolbox
Division of Extramural Research, Child Development and Behavior Branch
NICHD/NIH
Richard Gershon, PhD
Principal Investigator, NIH Baby Toolbox
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
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