ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the history of infant assessment, explores recent trends and issues concerned with measuring infant development, intelligence, and skills. Infancy is an immensely important period for cognitive development. In the 1930s, the Gesell Developmental Schedules and the Bayley Scales of Infant Development were developed to measure infant development. The early tests of infant mental functions yielded information on developmental norms but did not predict intelligence quotient (IQ) in later childhood. Historically, the primary purposes of infant assessment were to document developmental maturation and make long-term predictions about development, hence the rise of norm-referenced instruments. These assessments allowed the comparison of an individual infant's performance with the performance of a normed sample. The process of infant assessment yields information about infant development, temperament, personality, cognitive style, and parent-infant interaction. The assessment process can involve direct testing in which standardized tasks and stimulus items are presented to an infant in a controlled setting..
