Little is known, although much is theorized, about the long-run benefits of boosting children's social-emotional skills.
Across 450 post-test & follow-up impacts from 86 RCTs, we found similar fadeout rates for intervention impacts on social-emotional & cognitive skills.
1/11
Test score gains fade.
But long-term outcomes like graduation and earnings often persist.
So what does that mean for judging school success?
@drewhalbailey joins The Education Gadfly Show to discuss the fadeout effect.
Listen: https://t.co/kM6LhYSobH
📢 #EdWorkingPapers: @tw_watts, @EmmaRoseHart, & @drewhalbailey analyze 87 RCTs to assess persistence of educational intervention effects & find that fadeout is common. Intervention characteristics explain a small share of differences in persistence.
📄 https://t.co/oyTRofyxoh
"So, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot regularly argue for education investments on the expectation that they will produce positive long-lasting effects, then act as if fadeout was inevitable all along when we observe it." https://t.co/TrliK0AvG8
Shoutout to the larger team who collaborated on these projects: @CarolineBotvin, Casey Moran, @skruglnska, @shiramattera, Doug Clements, Julie Sarama, Dale Farran, and Mark Lipsey.
Why do educational intervention impacts fade? Isn't catch-up a good thing? Are sleeper effects real? Does fadeout mean failure?
@drewhalbailey, @tw_watts, and I address these questions & more in an EdNext piece & 4 new working papers!
https://t.co/Hqsgr1h512
Working paper #4
Across Head Start RCT clusters, we observed 40% persistence for cog skills, 20% for soc-emo skills @ 1yr follow-up. We found some (but not stat sig) support for transfer processes from effects on cog skills to effects on soc skills.
https://t.co/IIN5hNatZn
Our new review, with @tw_watts, @EmmaRoseHart, and April Yu, summarizing some recent work on "Learning about Development from Interventions" is published open access at Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. Comments, questions, insults welcome.
https://t.co/QPXwQw7znm
Finally, I am currently on the job market to continue studying the causal effects of early skills and contexts on later development! More information about my work here: https://t.co/T92ubrjwu7.
11/11
Little is known, although much is theorized, about the long-run benefits of boosting children's social-emotional skills.
Across 450 post-test & follow-up impacts from 86 RCTs, we found similar fadeout rates for intervention impacts on social-emotional & cognitive skills.
1/11
I have absolutely loved working on this project over the past 4 years with @tw_watts, @drewhalbailey, @prithasengupta_, & Sha Luo. Our MERF data is posted for public use on @LDbaseRepo. We have several projects using MERF in the works so stay tuned!
10/11