Key concepts

Before we begin, it's important to introduce a few 3di concepts.

Questions

The 3di has a bank of around 900 questions. Normally you will administer just a small subset.

Questions are short and highly structured. There are several question types, but all questions which contribute to the child's scores in the report have multiple choice or numeric answers. These are complemented by free-text answers which can record more qualitative information about the child's development for inclusion in the report, but you are free to skip these questions if you are interested only in the scoring tables.

It is always an option to mark a question as not applicable, or to leave it unanswered. The 3di handles missing information in a robust way.

You can attach written notes of any length to a question, which will be included in your final report.

Routes

To perform a single assessment, for example the brief Autism Spectrum Disorder assessment, only a small subset of these questions need to be answered. We call a subset of questions a Route. Normally you will select a Route at the start of an interview and follow it to completion, although the 3di allows you to switch between Routes at any time.

While the Interview Explorer shows every single available question, you will mainly use the Route Explorer, which displays just the questions on the currently selected route.

Reports

The output of a 3di assessment comes in the form of a Word report which can be regenerated at any time.

Just as there are a range of questions and Routes, the full report contains many different components. If you fill in every single available question, the report will be fully populated. However in practice you will choose a shorter Route. You can then generate a report and delete any parts which are not relevant to your assessment.