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Child development
The Economics of Age at School Entry: Insights from Evidence and Methods
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceThis article reviews the growing literature on age at school entry and its effects across the life course. Age at school entry affects a broad range of outcomes, including education, labor-market performance, health, social relationships, and family formation. We synthesize the evidence using a… more →
Using experimental variation to examine the (co-)development of cognitive and social-emotional skills in early childhood
Topics: MethodsTags: Child development, Early childhood education, Elementary schools, Returns to education and skillsQuestions about the stability of psychological constructs, skill generalization, and transfer have long motivated psychological research. Despite a proliferation of theory, the field has rarely established causal effects. We employed a novel approach to test the stability and codevelopment of… more →
How General is Educational Intervention Fadeout? A Meta-Analysis of Educational RCTs with Follow-Up
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceResearchers and policymakers pursue educational interventions with the goal of altering children’s long-term trajectories. However, many effects fade quickly after interventions end. Researchers have sought to address the fadeout problem by identifying characteristics of interventions that lead… more →
Predicting Persistence and Fadeout Across Multi-Site RCTs of an Early Childhood Mathematics Curriculum Intervention
Tyler W. Watts, Caroline M. Botvin, Drew H. Bailey, Emma R. Hart, Shira Mattera, Douglas H. Clements, Julie Sarama, Dale Farran, Mark Lipsey.Topics: Student LearningThis study examined predictors of persistence and fadeout across multiple cluster RCTs that evaluated a preschool mathematics curriculum. We used meta-analytic methods to explore how impacts on student mathematics achievement faded between post-test (i.e., endline) and one-year follow-up. We… more →
The West Texas Measles Outbreak and Student Absences
Topics: Student Well-BeingDeclining child-vaccination rates are driving a measles resurgence in the US, yet little evidence documents how these outbreaks may disrupt schooling. Using daily absence data from a school district at the center of the West Texas outbreak, this preregistered analysis finds absences increased 41… more →
Leveraging IEPs to Understand Special Education Services at Scale
7.5 million (15%) U.S. public school students have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) that guide $14 billion in special education services. However, the content of IEPs remains unexplored, primarily because they have been historically inaccessible to researchers at scale. In this study, we… more →
Impacts of Michigan Transitional Kindergarten Through Third Grade
Topics: Student LearningTransitional Kindergarten (TK) is a relatively new model of early childhood education, with little evidence on whether and how it affects children’s development. This study provides new evidence using data from Michigan, which has the nation’s second-largest TK program. Using survey data (N=171… more →
Teaching Practices and the Persistence of School-Entry Age Effects
Topics: Student LearningWe consider the effect of teaching practices on the persistence of school-entry age effects caused by rigid cutoff dates for school eligibility in Spain. We document significant school-entry age effects for the same cohort of students when they were in elementary and secondary school. Then, we… more →
School-based language, math, and reading interventions for executive functions in children and adolescents: A systematic review
Jens Dietrichson, Julie Kaas Seerup, Sofie Elgaard Iisager Jensen, Johan Klejs, Elizabeth Bengtsen, Martin Williams Strandby, Morten Kjær Thomsen.Topics: Student LearningExecutive functions are a set of cognitive skills and processes used when directing behaviour towards the attainment of a certain goal. A large literature has documented positive associations between executive functions and a variety of desirable outcomes throughout life, including academic… more →
Impacts of Oversubscribed Boston Pre-K Programs through Middle School
Christina Weiland, Tiffany Wu, Rebecca Unterman, Anna Shapiro, Shekinah Lightner, Thomas Staines, Annie Taylor.Topics: Student LearningIn this pre-registered study, we explored the impacts of Boston Pre-K on children’s educational trajectories, school progress/engagement, and academic achievement in late elementary and middle school using lotteries for oversubscribed schools in 2007-2011 (N=3,092 students; 24% of all applicants… more →
Creating Short Forms of Early Childhood Development Measures: A Framework for Quantifying Statistical, Conceptual, and Practical Tradeoffs in Direct Assessment
Direct assessments of early childhood development (ECD) are a cornerstone of research in developmental psychology and are increasingly used to evaluate programs and policies in lower- and middle-income countries. Despite strong psychometric properties, these assessments are too expensive and… more →
Does Early Childhood Education mitigate the birthdate effect? A regression discontinuity analysis of administrative data
Pablo Araya Cortés, Cristian Macías Domínguez, Luis Pires Jiménez, Rosa Santero Sánchez, Ismael Sanz Labrador.Topics: Student Well-BeingThis article examines the impact of within-class age differences on educational outcomes, using students' birth months in Madrid's primary schools as a natural experiment. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we analyze third-grade students to investigate these age-related effects.… more →
Early Childhood Education and Maltreated Children’s Behavioral and Cognitive Outcomes: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the National Survey of Childhood and Adolescent Well-Being II
Topics: Student Well-BeingPrior evidence shows that early childhood education (ECE) can serve as a protective factor that boosts maltreated children’s school readiness outcomes. Yet, less is known about ECE’s relationship to other developmental domains critical to their wellbeing including their adaptive behaviors and… more →
A Quantitative Study of Mathematical Language in Upper Elementary Classrooms
Topics: MethodsThis study provides the first large-scale quantitative exploration of mathematical language use in upper elementary U.S. classrooms. Our approach employs natural language processing techniques to describe variation in teachers’ and students’ use of mathematical language in 1,657 fourth and fifth… more →
The Effects of Public Pre-K for 3-year-olds on Early Elementary School Outcomes: Evidence from the DC Centralized Lottery
Topics: Student LearningThis study examines the effects of universal public pre-kindergarten for 3-year-olds (Pre-K3) on later public education outcomes, including enrollment, school mobility, special education status, and in-grade retention from kindergarten through second grade. While universal pre-kindergarten… more →
The Causal Effect of Parenting Style on Early Child Development
Topics: Student Well-BeingTags: Child development, ParentingThis paper presents causal evidence on the impact of parenting practices on early child development. We exploit exogenous changes in nurturing care induced by a parent training intervention to estimate the impact of nurturing parenting practices on child outcomes. We find a large and significant… more →
The Challenges of Scaling up Effective Child-Rearing Practices Using Technology in Developing Settings: Experimental Evidence From India
Topics: Student Well-BeingHome-visitation programs have improved child development in low- and middle-income countries, but they are costly to scale due to their reliance on trained workers. We evaluated an inexpensive and low-tech alternative with 2,433 caregivers of children aged 6 to 30 months served by 250 public… more →
Rural Early Childhood Programs & School Readiness: An Evaluation of the Early Steps to School Success Program
Topics: Student LearningPrior research has clearly established the substantial expected payoffs to investments in early childhood education. However, the ability to deliver early childhood programs differs across communities with access to high quality programing especially hard to establish in rural communities. We… more →
Fadeout and Persistence of Intervention Impacts on Social-Emotional and Cognitive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analytic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials
Topics: Student Well-BeingResearchers 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… more →
An Investigation of Head Start Preschool Children’s Executive Function, Early Literacy, and Numeracy Learning in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Topics: Student LearningThe COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on preschool children’s school readiness skills remains understudied. This research investigates Head Start preschool children’s early numeracy, literacy, and executive function outcomes during a pandemic-affected school year.