About this session

Thursday, 1:40 PM - 3:10 PM

Do Educational Interventions Produce Long-Term Effects? Using Meta-Analytic Data to Examine Persistence and Fadeout

This symposium will include three presentations of meta-analytic data examining the long-term persistence and fadeout of educational interventions. The session will include collaborations across institutions and work from international scholars. An independent discussant with experience in meta-analysis and socioecological contexts of development will provide comments on all three presentations.

The first two presentations will examine why intervention impacts on child skills and behaviors often fade in the short term. The first paper will provide evidence from a broad database of educational RCTs with follow-up. This project examines whether observable characteristics of interventions, such as developmental period and intervention foci, explain patterns of persistence and fadeout over 6 months to 1 year. The second presentation will provide evidence from a different meta-analytic project, and it will also examine various theories from developmental psychology and economics regarding why intervention effects might persist or fade. Both of these presentations address related theories using independent meta-analytic samples, allowing for converging inference and replication. The final paper will examine whether interventions that produce fading effects in the short term can produce longer-run impacts on adult outcomes. This project has compiled a set of RCTs with impacts reported on short-term and adult outcomes, allowing the authors to test developmental theories regarding why childhood interventions could produce effects that persist into adulthood.

Together, these three papers provide a rare opportunity to examine crucial theories about the role of educational experiences in shaping children’s long-term developmental trajectories using meta-analytic evidence from causally informed studies.

Paper #1
Title	Explaining Fade-Out and Persistence of Intervention Effects: Meta-Analytic Evidence
Presenting author	Jens Dietrichson, VIVE- The Danish Center for Social Research, Denmark

Paper #2
Title	Examining whether intervention characteristics affect follow-up impacts above and beyond short-term impacts
Presenting author	Tyler W. Watts, Teachers College, Columbia University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Can we forecast when educational interventions will find impacts on adult outcomes?
Presenting author	Emma R. Hart, Teachers College, Columbia University, United States

View all paper details

Session chair
Drew Bailey, Ph.D., University of California- Irvine, United States

Discussant
D. A. Briley, Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States

⇦ Back to schedule