Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, 3rd Edition (Bayley-III)

Wondering whether your child is developing normally in early childhood?

The Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development 3rd edition (Bayley-III) assesses child development in 5 domains: 

Ψ Adaptive Behaviour Scales: measures functional skills in areas of conceptual, social and practical abilities 
Ψ Cognitive scales: evaluates play skills, information processing, memory and habituation skills, and reasoning abilities 
Ψ Language scales: assesses receptive and expressive language;

Ψ Receptive language: comprehending and responding to requests, and to discriminate between sounds in environment
Ψ Expressive language: naming objects and actions, communicate wants, respond to questions, and use multi-word sentences

Ψ Motor scales: evaluates both fine and gross motor skills 
Ψ Social-Emotional Functioning Scales: evaluates mastery of functional emotional skills, like self-regulation, socialisation, and ability to use emotional gestures to communicate 

The child psychologist will administer cognitive, language and motor scales to the child, while the caregiver will be administered the social-emotional functioning and adaptive behavioural scales.

The Bayley-III’s uses lie in measuring a child’s early developmental progress, identifying issues and planning intervention. The cognitive and language scales are useful for an early diagnosis of learning disorder and can also differentiate more severe forms of learning disorders. The scores from each subtest can help in differential diagnosis of developmental disorders and identify the specific issues of concern.

However, the main purpose of the Bayley-III is to identify developmental delays. If official diagnoses are required, we recommend using this scale in tandem with other scales (depending on each child’s needs), such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP-2) and other relevant assessments.