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The INTERGROWTH-21st Neurodevelopment assessment INTER-NDA is a comprehensive, sensitive and reliable tool to measure cognition, motor skills, language and behavior in 2-year-old children. It is quick and easy to administer and consists of a series of play-related tasks such as building a tower of cubes and completing a puzzle. It also consists of a few questions that a researcher will ask a parent about his/her child’s behavior and skills. The test takes 15 minutes, and has been shown to be as effective in measuring child development as the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, IIIrd edition (a commonly used test to measure child development).

The INTER-NDA was designed to be administered by specialists and non-specialists in a standardized manner, and has been used to assess over 8000 (including 600 in Oxford, UK) children in 13 countries since its creation in 2012. It was developed as part of the INTERGROWTH-21st Project a longitudinal, international study of fetal and infant growth and development in 8 countries across the world. The INTERGROWTH-21st Project has produced the first-ever international standards of child neurodevelopment for 2 year olds, describing how children at age 2 across the world should develop under conditions of optimal health, growth, and nutrition and in good-enough environments; rather than describing how children at a particular place and time are developing.

You can read more about the INTER-NDA here

You can watch the video on the INTER-NDA assessment here:

There are also a number of peer reviewed scientific publications about the INTER-NDA. Some of these are:

Villar J, Fernandes M et al. Neurodevelopmental milestones and associated behaviours are similar among healthy children across diverse geographical locations.Nature Communications (in press, 2019) 


Fernandes, Michelle, et al. "The INTERGROWTH-21st Project neurodevelopment package: a novel method for the multi-dimensional assessment of neurodevelopment in pre-school age children." PLoS One 9.11 (2014): e113360. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113360

Murray, Elizabeth, et al. "Evaluation of the INTERGROWTH-21st Neurodevelopment Assessment (INTER-NDA) in 2 year-old children." PloS one 13.2 (2018): e0193406. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193406

Slim J, Villar J, Guerrero Varela G, Hernandez Castillo F, Lozada Guzman M de la L, Buchan Duran A, Cheikh Ismail L, Savini S, Vasquez Arango P, Stein A, Kennedy S, Fernandes M*. Individual or group-based approach to the assessment of preschool children: A comparison using the INTERGROWTH-21st Neurodevelopment Assessment (INTER-NDA). International Journal of Growth and Development, 2018; 2(11): 11-33. doi: 10.25081/ijgd.2018.v2.60

http://igdjournal.com/index.php/ijgd/article/view/60/59

Other information about the Package can found here: