Definition of Gesell Developmental Schedules

Gesell Developmental Schedules: A measure of child development devised by the American child psychologist and pediatrician Arnold Gesell (1880-1961) who founded the Clinic of Child Development at Yale in 1911 and directed it for many years. There he pioneered the use of motion-picture cameras to study the development of normal infants and young children. He filmed the children, analyzed their functioning frame-by-frame, and learned the normal stages in early human behavioral development. The Gesell Developmental Schedules are a gauge of the status of a child's motor and language development and personal-social and adaptive behaviors.

Since the brilliant studies by Gesell, a number of other behavioral assessments have been established for children. These include:

• The Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS), better known as "the Brazelton" (because it was devised by the Harvard pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton);
• The Denver Developmental Screening Test (DDST) for children 0-6 years of age;
• The ELM (Early Language Milestone) scale for children 0-3 years of age;
• The CAT (Clinical Adaptive Test) and CLAMS (Clinical Linguistic and Auditory Milestone Scale) for children 0-3 years of age;
• The Infant Monitoring System for children aged 4-36 months;
• The Early Screening Inventory for children 3-6 years of age; and
• The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test ("the Peabody") for testing children 2 1/2 to 4 years of age.

The purposes of developmental assessment depend on the age of the child. For a newborn, testing may detect neurologic problems, such as cerebral palsy. For an infant, testing often serves to reassure parents or to identify the nature of problems early enough hopefully to treat them. Later in childhood, testing can help delineate academic and social problems, again, hopefully in time to remedy them.