Search and Filter

Submit a paper

Not yet affiliated? Have a paper you wish to post? Check out the EdWorkingPapers' scope and FAQs, and then submit your manuscript here.

Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analytic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials

Researchers and policymakers aspire for educational interventions to change children’s long-run developmental trajectories. However, intervention impacts on cognitive and achievement measures commonly fade over time. Less is known, although much is theorized, about socialemotional skill persistence. The current meta-analysis investigated whether intervention impacts on social-emotional skills demonstrated greater persistence than impacts on cognitive skills. We drew studies from eight pre-existing meta-analyses, generating a sample of 86 educational RCTs targeting children from infancy through adolescence, together involving 56,662 participants and 450 outcomes measured at post-test and at least one follow-up. Relying on a meta-regression approach for modeling persistence rates, we tested the extent to which post-test impact magnitudes predicted follow-up impact magnitudes. We found that post-test impacts were equally predictive of follow-up impacts for cognitive and social-emotional skills at 6- to 12- months follow-up, indicating similar conditional persistence rates across skill types. At 1- to 2- years follow-up, rates were lower and, if anything, cognitive skills showed greater conditional persistence than social-emotional skills. A small positive follow-up effect was observed, on average, beyond what was directly predicted by the post-test impact, indicating that interventions may have long-term effects that are not fully mediated by post-test effects. This pattern of results implied that smaller post-test impacts produced more persistent effects than larger post-test impacts, and social-emotional skill impacts were smaller, on average, than cognitive skill impacts. Considered as a whole, intervention impacts on both social-emotional and cognitive skills demonstrated fadeout, especially for interventions that produced larger initial effects. Implications for theory and future directions are discussed.

Keywords
meta-analysis, educational RCTs, fadeout, social-emotional skills, cognitive skills
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/7j8s-dy98
EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:
Hart, Emma R., Drew H. Bailey, Sha Luo, Pritha Sengupta, and Tyler W. Watts. (). Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analytic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials. (EdWorkingPaper: -782). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/7j8s-dy98

Machine-readable bibliographic record: RIS, BibTeX