That's not for real, is it? I mean, they expect 4 yr olds to do basically not much more than 2 yr olds. (My almost-2 is pretty much an "average" 4, though he can't count out loud & so misses a bunch of those things, I didn't look at the five year old, though, if there's as little change, he might be there, too...)
...
I know this sounds a bit daft, but I'm *sure* a lot of this stuff is just to make 63.7% (or so) of the population think their kids are in the top 10%. How could there be THAT little CHANGE over time?
I really don't think that they are making these lists so parents feel that their kids are smarter. Just looking through the list of the 2-3 year olds I see some areas that DD is right on mark with (more of the language skills). For instance, it says that 2 year olds can sing the ABC song. Yep, DD just learned that a couple of weeks ago. However, it also says that they don't recognize letters (well, she's been doing that since she's 12 months old...).
A lot of my friends kids are ahead on this thing but then again I know my friend's school history and my 3 closest mom friends were all in gifted programs growing up (as well as their DH's) so my sample is pretty skewed.
That being said we go to the playground often and at least when it comes to gross motor skills (I don't know all the details of these kids' lives so I can't say much more than that!) the lists seems to be pretty spot on. For instance, DH just met a kid today who still wasn't walking at 16 months but there's a wide range of normal for these things.
FWIW, there are a number of things DD can't do on the 4 year old list but others that she's well beyond (mostly puzzles and to a lesser degree route counting/number recognition). But she enumerates inconsistently. She used to go much farther with it (maybe 8 or so?) and now barely will do it with a handful of objects but her interests seemed to have moved on. She's definitely not doing simple addition/subtraction, though!
As to the question about change over time. Some toddlers just might not care about this stuff at all or are not exposed to much math stuff. DD's never been exposed to anything with gardening (unfortunately) so her skill set in that area has not changed at all over time.
