Developmental status among 3 to 5-year-old preschool children in three kindergartens in the Peitou District of Taipei City.

A descriptive correlational study that used the Denver Developmental Screening Test (DDST)-Chinese version (the testing items and norms were translated from DDST) was conducted to evaluate the child developmental status in three kindergartens in Peitou District of Taipei City. Seventy-one children between 3 and 5 years of age were included. The DDST has four developmental dimensions: gross motor, fine motor-adaptive, language, and personal-social. The tests yielded 7 (9.9 %) subjects with questionable and 1 (1.4 %) subject with abnormal developmental results. The subjects' gender, parental educational level, parental occupation, sibling number, and day-care provider before age 3 did not relate to the test results. The percentage of children passing each item decreased as the task became harder in terms of the developmental order in the gross motor, fine motor-adaptive, language and personal-social dimensions of the DDST. These indicated that the DDST-Chinese version is valid in capturing the maturing status of the children in this study. Of items intersecting the subject's age-line, the gross motor dimension had the lowest mean percentage of pass and all-pass rate, which indicated a lag in gross motor development compared to the other three dimensions. Conversely, the fine-motor adaptive dimension had the highest mean percentage of pass and all-pass rate, and more than 60 % of the study subjects could pass items that were ahead of their age-line. This suggested that development in the fine-motor adaptive dimension was more advanced than the norms of the DDST. There were no distinct differences between the study subjects and the norms in the language and person-social dimensions. The differences between the study subjects and the norms in the fine motor-adaptive dimension suggest that the DDST-Chinese version norms need to be standardized in order to account for cultural differences. To be a valid tool, the norms of the DDST-Chinese version should be standardized to be concordant with current development among Taiwanese children.