Coding Readiness Assessment (CRA)
Category: Student Learning
The importance of providing children with more robust opportunities to access high-quality science instruction is a widely recognized challenge. Unfortunately, science instruction is often neglected in the earliest school grades, meaning that many young children face opportunity gaps to learning science. We present the results of a meta-analysis of experimental and quasiexperimental research of the effects of classroom-based pre-K-1st grade science educational interventions. We find that, on average, treatment group children in early science educational interventions demonstrated significantly stronger science achievement outcomes compared to control group children. Most of the programmatic and contextual moderator variables examined were not significant predictors of the magnitudes of achievement impacts. Rather, it appeared that a variety of different intervention strategies could effectively improve early science learning outcomes. We found suggestive evidence of positive impacts on children's literacy and socialemotional learning outcomes, and on teacher-level outcomes. We discuss implications and promising directions for future research.
Keywords
Science education; early childhood; meta-analysis; professional development
Education level
Topics
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/drc7-7b08
